“Niall, there was nothing they could have done,” Sally offered from the kitchenette threshold.
“No!” Niall cut her off. “They need to hear this.” Even though the god of thunder was a full head taller, Niall stepped closer and stabbed him in the chest with an angry finger. “She stood against her own family to preserve your sacred peace. She lost her brother instead of going to war.”
Thor breathed heavily as his face grew redder. Before he could erupt, Heimdall stepped between him and Niall.
“Unfortunately, war is what we’ve gotten anyway,” Heimdall said. “Even without the eel stones, she’ll be calling in her sisters now. Won’t she?”
Niall backed away. “I expect so.”
“It doesn’t have to come to that.” Freya raised herself to her feet. She wobbled a bit and reached back to the chair for support. “There’s still something Badbh wants that could satisfy her and keep things from escalating too much more.”
Heimdall turned and looked at her.
“Me,” Freya said.
“Absolutely not!” Heimdall stormed toward her, and Freya sank back into the chair.
“I know I couldn’t trade myself for his release,” Freya said in a small voice. “But if I offered myself, willingly, she might be amenable to a newly negotiated truce. Give Vanaheim back to the Tuatha de Danann free and clear, but limit its borders to the island of Éireann.”
Heimdall shook his head. “Give an inch . . .”
Thor strode to the opposite wall and put his fist through the plaster. Loki rested a hand on the big god’s shoulder as he pulled his hand out of the wall.
“Easy there,” Loki said. “This is a difficult night for all of us.”
Thor glared at the trickster god. “I’m not done with you,” he spat. He grabbed the apartment door’s metal handle and nearly wrenched the paneled wood out of the frame. He stormed out of the apartment and slammed the door. The thunder of his footsteps reverberated down the hallway.
Loki turned to Niall and motioned him toward the kitchenette. Niall pulled a handful of wild grasses out of his jacket pocket and handed it over.
“You have to at least let me try.” Freya looked up at Heimdall from her chair in the sitting room. She scooted back into the cushions and tried to get comfortable. “I don’t have to go back there. I can go into journey state. I should be safe, physically.”
“No,” Heimdall said. “This is not up for discussion.”
In the tiny kitchen, Sally poured hot water from the electric kettle into a ceramic mug. Loki looked over her shoulder. “Why don’t you let me do that?”
“Land healer,” Heimdall turned to Niall. “What more can you tell me about the natrolite stones? Now that we have both of them.”
It was Freya who answered. “What power they held is now gone. Sally and I saw to that.”
“What?” Sally asked as she stepped into the parlor. “I didn’t know—”
“It was the only way to subdue Badbh,” Freya said.
“But it’s just temporary,” Heimdall added.
Freya nodded and slumped back into the chair. “Please, just let me try.”
“Here. Drink this.” Loki walked to Freya from the kitchenette and handed her a mug of tea. She inhaled the calming aroma of chamomile and other herbs and nodded her thanks. “But I am doing this. You can’t stop me.” She took a long drink from the cup and breathed deeply. “I can reach out to her anytime, anywhere . . .”
Freya’s eyes fluttered and Loki retrieved the mug from her before she dropped it to the floor. Within seconds, Freya was snoring.
Loki stood and turned to Heimdall. “She won’t be doing any journeying. Not for a few hours at least.”
“You drugged her?” Sally stood in the middle of the room. She watched Freya, unconscious in the armchair, and felt envious. She eyed the mug in Loki’s hands and wondered if there was enough tea left to knock Sally out, too.
“Just some herbs,” Niall said. “To help her sleep.”
“It’s for her own good,” Heimdall replied.
“And ours,” Loki added.
“Whatever.” Sally shook her head. “Take her into my room. She’ll be more comfortable there.”
While Heimdall and Loki lifted Freya and transported her into Sally’s bedroom, Sally stepped toward Clare’s door. She lifted her hand to knock, but then stopped herself. She reached for the knob and opened the door.
Sally had never been inside Clare’s room, not since they first moved in. Clare had always been going on about protective wards and energetic shields to keep out trespassers. That had been fine with Sally. She’d had no interest in visiting Clare’s room anyway.
But now she stepped into the room. It had the same dimensions as Sally’s bedroom on the other side of the parlor, but Clare had packed an impressive amount of stuff into the small space. Coat hooks on all four walls supported a few jackets and scarves but were mostly laden with ritual capes, strings of semi-precious stones, and amulet necklaces Sally had never seen her roommate wear. Then Sally touched the Raido-inscribed pendant she wore beneath her own sweater.
A wicker broomstick was mounted over the inside of the doorway, and boxes of incense, candles, and reference books peeked out from underneath the half-made bed. Sally considered crawling beneath the inviting comforter and seeking out her own temporary oblivion, but she could just make out the indentations Clare had made in the sheets when she’d last slept here. Sally’s mind flashed back to the sight of Clare’s lifeless body beneath The Morrigan’s clawed, dirty feet as it sank slowly into the grassy water of the Black Pool cauldron. Sally turned away from the bed.
There were three posters on the far wall, but not of Enya or the actresses from Charmed as Sally would have expected. One poster celebrated the band Godsmack. Another was a colorful display of the sacred symbols of the world’s mythologies. The last was a long, narrow chart of the moon’s phases for the year. Over the bed, Clare had tacked up a 10”x14” map of Ireland with what Sally supposed were sacred sites circled in blue ink.
Dublin—specifically Dublin Castle—was marked with a pushpin.
Giving into exhaustion, Sally sat down on Clare’s bed and leaned back against the blue-and-green comforter that had been shoved up against the wall. She looked at the lunar calendar, and then blinked at the map.
“Clare,” Sally said. The name felt empty in her mouth. She felt like she should be crying for her lost roommate, even if they hadn’t exactly been friends. That was the compassionate thing to do. But she couldn’t summon the tears. Not now.
Tara. Sally smirked at Clare’s insistence on the magickal name. It definitely hadn’t suited her. At first, Sally had assumed Clare was referencing Gone with the Wind, but then she’d gone into that song and dance of justification about the Hill of Tara and the High Kings of Ireland.
Sally’s eyes flashed on the map again, and she leapt to her feet. Tara. She looked at the lunar calendar and realized the date. It was after midnight already. Samhain had come.
The coronation of the King of the Vanir, Babdh had said.
“Heimdall!” Sally yelled.
14
Badbh folded her hands together in her lap. She watched, and she waited.
The grass and turf cover over her well had been made solid again, but her cauldron remained wet inside. Hundreds of Tuatha de Danann, on the verge of rebirth and renewal, slumbered on the cauldron floor around her. They were as still as so many corpses, but she could feel the living energy radiating from them.
Immediately before her lay the body of her grandson. The heir to the throne of Éireann looked more like his old self now, with his pale green skin, elongated limbs and fingers, and pleasantly pointed ears. He did not stir.
If only he had come to her willingly.
Badbh fetched a cup of sparkling liquid from the well-within-the-well at the center of her cauldron. She carried the cup to her grandson and knelt beside him.
“Wake,” she commanded.
Freyr’s lids slid open, and Badbh smiled at the faint, bluish glow of his eyes.
“We greet the new king,” she said.
“Where am I?” Freyr blinked at the darkness and propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes closed again and he nearly dropped back to the stone floor.
“Drink.” Badbh supported the back of his head with one hand and held the stone cup to his lips with the other. She saw his breath deepen and become more even as the elixir slid down his throat. “Good.” She set the cup on the floor.
Freyr looked at her and sat up. “You have brought me into the Black Pool.”
“At long last.” Badbh spread her lips into a wide smile of pointed, brownish teeth. “The Vanir will rise again.”
Freyr was confused, his mind shrouded in cobwebs. He glanced around at the sleeping faeries and tried to remember how he had gotten here himself.
Badbh touched his face with her taloned fingers, leaving the faintest trace of a scratch on his skin. “All will become clear, in time. You must be strong now. Your people need you.”
Freyr looked up at the dirt and stone that separated Badbh’s cauldron from the surface. “We are trapped.”
Badbh chuckled and offered him the cup again. “There are other pathways, dearest grandchild.” She gestured toward the slumbering creatures. “Now that there are more of us, gathered together in solidarity of purpose, we have nearly everything we need.”
Freyr drained the cup, and the tinge of his skin deepened to the color of Connemara marble.
“Feel better?” She grinned at him.
Freyr flexed his fingers and stared at his hands. “I remember . . . being pale.”
“It is best forgotten,” Badbh said.
She felt Freyr’s eyes on her as she reached to the floor and picked up a coil of polished metal. She held it up for his brief inspection, then slid the eel-shaped cuff onto her left forearm. She thrilled at the electricity that surged through her veins at the touch of the metal to her skin. The long tail of the eel wrapped around her arm and held tight.
“I thought that had been stolen?” Freyr rubbed at his face, trying to brush aside the thick curtains that hid his memories.
“It has been fashioned anew.” Badbh smiled and admired her adornment—a black eel made from the iron of the gates of Dublin Castle and infused with the sacrificial blood of Tara the Witch from America. The human girl had served a greater purpose than she could have guessed.
Freyr’s eyes widened. “It does not burn you?”
“Not in a way that is painful.”
Freyr reached out to touch the coiled band, but Badbh smacked his hand away. “It is for none but me. Not even the King of the Vanir may wield this as I do.”
Freyr dropped his hands in his lap. He felt agitated, but he didn’t know why. “Is there someplace I’m supposed to be?” he asked. “Are there others who are waiting for me, somewhere?”
Badbh ran her gnarled fingers over the twisted iron on her arm. “You are precisely where you need to be for now, my child.” Her fingertips traced the empty spaces where the eel’s eyes should have been. “Your people have been waiting for you a very long time. They will not have to wait much longer.”
Badbh rose to her feet and extended her arm to help Freyr up. “But first, there is something you and I must do together.”
Freyr was unsteady climbing up off the damp, stone floor. He leaned on his grandmother’s arm for balance before finding his feet. The damp stone felt soothing against his bare soles. Freyr stood up tall and looked down on Badbh. There was another woman he should have been standing with, someone blond and with pinkish skin, but he could not bring her face or name to mind. He felt the urge to make a provocative and snide remark, but he pushed it aside.
“Will they come?” He glanced again at the black eel coiled around Badbh’s arm. “How will you call them, without the stones?”
Badbh laughed. “It was not the stones that were significant, young one, but the power they held. And thanks to—” Badbh caught herself before she mentioned his sister’s name. She needed to keep Freyr focused on the cauldron and their quest. “That energy has been returned to me now, though not in the most charitable of ways.”
She walked across the sloping floor toward the well-within-the-well and motioned for Freyr to stand opposite her. The elixir of Éireann roiled briefly in the stone cylinder between them and cast their shadows on the cauldron’s ancient stone walls. Badbh took a breath, and the shimmering liquid smoothed over like a sheet of frosted glass.
Badbh laid her hands on the rim of the smaller well and nodded for Freyr to do the same. She leaned over the scrying surface and called an intimate chant from the core of her being. This song she hadn’t sung since before her long slumber, though it had ached in her throat.
Freyr picked up the melody, and Badbh’s eyes danced. The vengeance of Odin be damned. Badbh’s own blood picked up her song, and her senses filled with the reverberating call. The two names she’d longed to speak aloud rose in her throat. They would no longer be denied. How many millennia had it been since she’d last set eyes upon her own sisters?
“Macha!” Badbh cried out in a voice that rooted itself in the rock beneath her feet. “Nemain!”
A crystal mist wafted up from the elixir well. Badbh continued her chant.
15
“So how much trouble will you be in?” Heimdall asked as he climbed out of the Red Top Tours bus that Niall had borrowed from his uncle without asking. It was already late morning. They’d lost the wee hours of the day to fitful sleep, the usual arguments over strategy, and waiting for Freya to come out of her drugged stupor. Then they’d criss-crossed the countryside looking for this particular spot.
“Well, let’s see.” Niall pocketed the keys and watched Freya and Thor climb over a rotting wooden fence on their way toward a massive yew tree that sheltered a stone dolmen.
“This is the second full day of classes I’ve missed, in a row,” Niall continued. “I’ve committed what is essentially automobile theft from a family member. I’m about to go head-to-head with The Morrigan on what is probably the most dangerous day of the year to do so. And I’ve got the disappearance of an international classmate to try to explain.”
Heimdall winced at the last comment. Other than Sally’s frantic epiphany regarding the calendar and map in Clare’s bedroom, the Moon Witch had been careful not to speak her roommate’s name or even make allusion to her in the fourteen hours since the girl’s body had been claimed by Badbh’s cauldron.
“So, all in all, just about the worst trouble imaginable.” Niall shrugged.
“The worst?” Loki stepped up behind Niall and offered a sly smile. “You should be more optimistic. It can always get worse.”
Niall rolled his eyes and walked away.
Heimdall turned to Loki. “That’s not really helping.”
Sally stood just outside the wooden fence. She guessed the pickets and planks had once been white. Now they were dirty with age and were turning to dust.
“What are you looking for?” she called to Freya and Thor, just a couple of yards away. They stood on either side of what looked like a roughly-hewn stone table, set atop a collection of smaller standing rocks. Freya had said this was a particularly important dolmen, but Sally was happy to have the dilapidated fence between her and the stone slab. She was still reeling from everything she’d witnessed the day before—from the shapeshifting pooka to the deaths of Freyr and Clare. Given that today happened to be October 31, Sally really hoped Freya wasn’t going grave-robbing.
“Tools.” Freya grunted as she tried to shift the heavy tablet that topped the dolmen. Thor grabbed the opposite side of the stone. Working together they moved the slab, inch by inch, off the top of the prehistoric structure and let it slide to the ground.
Thor leaned over the open burial site and wrinkled his nose. “Nothing too fresh, I hope.”
Freya looked up at him with an impatient frown. “You seriously think I’d g
o about disturbing the Éireann dead, Samhain or not?”
“But isn’t that what—?” Thor started to respond, but Sally cleared her throat and cut him off. He looked over at her, and she shook her head.
“Sorry,” Thor muttered instead. “I just meant, isn’t there any way to get him back?”
“Thor!” Sally shouted at him.
The god of thunder rested his hands on his hips. “But it’s what we’re all thinking, right? Why not just talk about it?” He gestured to Sally. “You want Freyr back, right? I want Freyr back. I’m guessing she wouldn’t be sorry to have her brother back, too.” He motioned to Freya on the other side of the rocky grave. “If we’re going to go about trying to do something about that, this would be the day to do it, right?”
Thor looked from Sally to Freya. “Right?” he asked again.
Freya swallowed hard. “There’s something in here I think you might like.” She sniffed away the tears in her voice and leaned over the stones into the burial mound. Standing up again, she raised a small cobbler’s hammer and brushed off the dirt that clung to it. She held it out to Thor.
“It may not look like much, and I know it’s no replacement for Mjölnir.”
Thor took the tool into his hands. The shaft barely extended beyond the length of his palm. He looked at Freya. “I know Freyr’s death has been a shock but . . . Is this some kind of joke?”
Freya’s expression darkened. “This was the hammer used by none other than Naomhán Greentoes.”
Thor lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to elaborate. She continued to glower at him.
“And that’s impressive because . . . ?” Thor asked.
Freya clenched her jaw and looked down at the ground. The wind played in the tree branches over her head as dark clouds loomed and threw her face into shadow. “The most accomplished leprechaun cobbler of his or any generation since, and a hero of the Tuatha de Danann. Naomhán stood against the Normans when they invaded, and wielded that very hammer, his own humble cobbling tool—”
The Black Pool (Valhalla Book 3) Page 18
