When the chief Druid told Barnaby, “She is at peace,” it took four elves to restrain the distraught wizard who lunged in fury at the startled old man. Finally, when there was no other way to calm him, Moira put Barnaby into a deep sleep.
“Forgive him,” she said to the Druid. “He is not himself.”
With infinite compassion, the elderly priest replied, “Take care that he does not lose himself forever.”
At the time, Moira had not fully understood the warning. That insight came only after she watched Barnaby hunt Adeline’s killer with the ruthless passion that carried him to Brussels where he contemplated betraying his very soul.
Moira had loved him then just as she loved him now, but she did not speak of her feelings. She loved him when she followed him to the New World, and she loved him when she stood in the Shevington square and watched him marry a Cherokee woman named Adoette. Moira loved him as he raised his baby daughter, Knasgowa, and she loved him when fate again made him a widower.
Then, after a wait of almost 200 years, and following a decent interval of mourning for Adoette, Moira took Barnaby’s hand and explained that the time of her patience had come to an end.
“You do not know the truth of who I am, Moira,” he’d said, tears welling in his eyes. “You will not love me when you know.”
At the end of his confession, he sat before her with head bowed.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied brokenly. “Is that not enough?”
“I care not if you are Barnaby Shevington or Barnabas Chesterfield,” she said quietly. “I stood with you at the brink when you stopped yourself from repaying murder with murder. Your name does not measure your worth as a man to me.”
But now, the dark legacy of the Chesterfield name once again haunted the man she loved. Moira feared the long-postponed reckoning of the two brothers might be at hand. Irenaeus threatened not just those whom Barnaby loved, but also the natural order to whose service her beloved had dedicated his life.
She had only one consolation. If Irenaeus was gathering amulets and artifacts to make a bid to control the human realm, he at least no longer had the Sinclair witch by his side. Moira had always believed Brenna goaded Irenaeus to kill Adeline and was the real force behind his ambitious plans.
Wily, intelligent, and powerful, the red-haired sorceress let nothing and no one get in her way — which is why Moira found herself uncharacteristically amused that the great Brenna Sinclair was, in the end, killed by a crippled werecat, a ghost, and a rat.
Emerging from her reveries, Moira stood up and started back for the house. When Barnaby returned, she planned to have more source material ready for him. If he wanted to find the Amulet of Caorunn without the aid of the Ruling Elders, then so be it.
10
The Deepest Reaches of the In Between
The cold blade split her ribs sending a searing flood upward through her throat and out over her lips. As the drops fell toward the restraints binding her body, the witch remembered. The spilled blood reawakened her magic, sending it to rise in a wall of enveloping flame.
Brenna Sinclair awakened with a strangled gasp. She reached for her chest, feeling the ridge of scar tissue through the thin material of her nightgown. Even the healing force of her regenerated powers hadn’t stopped the skin from knotting and twisting as the wound closed. Sometimes, when the air grew cold and wet, throbbing pain radiated outward from the scar reminding her of the high price of trust.
Neither nightmares nor physical pain fueled her memories, however. The scenes of her past remained ever present for Brenna, informing and driving her plans for the future.
She had believed Irenaeus Chesterfield when he armed her with the Amulet of the Phoenix and sent her into the fairy mound. He spoke of the alliance they had shared since Brenna, as a frightened young girl, entered the deep forest at his behest to sell her soul and emerge reborn.
Sitting up and running her hand through her hair, Brenna caught sight of her reflection in the mirror beside her bed. The woman who looked back at her was not the abused and scorned daughter of a cruel Templar knight.
Like Irenaeus, a birth defect prevented the blossoming of Brenna’s magic, but it also shaped her destiny. Any bitterness over that genetic fault disappeared in the vortex of the Creavit transformation, but no matter how powerful either of them ultimately became, Brenna thought she and Irenaeus would always understand one another.
Both had felt the scorn of their Fae kin who regarded them as mere humans, and both had burned with shame as they retreated to the fringes of a society where magic fairly crackled in the air. But when she became Creavit, Brenna never again endured the scorn or mistreatment of a man — nor had she relied on a man to guide the course of her life path.
With immortality came a confident arrogance. What did minor mistakes matter with an infinite number of potential course corrections lying ahead?
But then, an upstart young witch named Jinx Hamilton robbed Brenna of her cherished acquired magic. For the first time in nine centuries, Brenna felt fear, crying out through the void for the one friend she knew would find her — Irenaeus Chesterfield — and thus made herself vulnerable.
The wizard answered her call, but in his surprise in seeing her so weak, he asked Brenna how long it had been since she was “last human.” Stung by the cruel insult, she’d wanted to scream at him, “You know the answer, Irenaeus. You were there!”
But instead, she played along because she had need of his good will. No one loved verbal sparring more than Irenaeus. He’d wanted to hear her say the words — to relive through them her vicious treatment at the hands of her father and brothers.
Cruelty, Irenaeus said, was for the savoring. In remembering, he claimed, they remained strong and focused. It mattered not whether the wrongs were against himself or others. All pain could be used for the same purpose.
When she reminded him that the men in her family paid for their actions with slow, agonized deaths, Irenaeus smiled in satisfaction. He didn’t expect Brenna to neatly turn the tables on him in his own game of probing questions.
“Why did you seek your powers?” she asked, although she knew the answer.
Irenaeus looked at her, allowing the reflection of the sensitive young man he’d been in the 12th century to rise to the surface. “Women were not the only ones used cruelly in the world into which we were born,” he replied.
She knew the story of his bargain with the Darkness, forged from the bitter flames of his family’s rejection because it had been whispered to her within the bonds of intimacy. After Irenaeus and Brenna became friends, and before they worked as pragmatic business partners, they’d been lovers.
Brenna foolishly relied on that remembered connection when she allowed herself to be convinced to enter the fairy mound beneath Jinx Hamilton’s store in Briar Hollow. The plan Irenaeus devised brought Brenna closer to the Shevington portal than she’d dreamed possible, but on the brink of success, she failed — maddeningly foiled by the Hamilton witch’s minions.
Impaled on the blade wielded by a ghost soldier, Brenna’s blood ignited the flames that engulfed her body and sent her tumbling through a black and bottomless void. At first, she feared to die, and then she begged for the pain to end — but her release did not come with death. Instead, the air turned gray and wet, extinguishing the blaze as Brenna’s descent slowed.
She came to rest on soft ground. Exhausted and at the brink of unconsciousness, Brenna heard a resonant voice say, “Lift her carefully,” followed by the sound of beating wings.
Hours later, she awakened under the oddly gentle gaze of a massive eagle. “You have chosen to remain among the living,” he said. “That is good.”
Brenna tried to answer, but the words stuck in her parched throat. The eagle’s head turned to the side. He spoke to someone Brenna couldn’t see. “Bring her water,” he ordered.
A small figure appeared beside the bed. Brenna took the newcomer to be a brownie, but
then she saw the pointed ears and tiny horns. An imp? Into what strange place had she fallen?
The imp supported her into a half-reclining position. Brenna accepted an offered cup of water, drinking deeply to let the pure, sweet liquid soothe her raw throat.
From her more elevated position Brenna could see that her companion was not a bird at all, but a gryphon, with the head, wings and front talons of an eagle, but the body, tail, and hind paws of a lion.
“Who are you?” she croaked.
“You may call me, Aquila,” the gryphon said. “Welcome to my abode.”
Brenna’s eyes wandered over the room. Rich tapestries covered the rough-hewn walls. There were few pieces of furniture, but an astonishing number of books filled the rows of shelves covering the walls.
“Aquila?” she said. “That’s Latin for eagle.”
A chuckle emanated from the gryphon’s yellow hooked beak. “You could not pronounce my true name,” he said. “I opted for something more accessible. And you are?”
“Brenna,” she said. “Brenna Sinclair.”
The gryphon’s head dipped in acknowledgment. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Do you like games of strategy?”
Brenna smiled at the memory. Since that first night, she had faced Aquila across many game boards and enjoyed hours of conversation with the erudite and intellectual creature.
The fire of her reawakened magic had sent her into the no man’s land of the deep In Between. There, she’d found the only companion she’d ever known other than Irenaeus Chesterfield and Hamish Crawford, the father of the child she lost to those Druid scum, the Skeas.
As the bond between them grew, Brenna told Aquila the story of her long life, and under his probing questions, she began to re-evaluate many decisions and presumptions.
When he asked her one cold evening why she had sought her magic, she replied without hesitation, “To seek revenge on those who wronged me.”
Aquila cocked his head and studied her with one glittering eye. “And in all these many years, you’ve found no other use for your powers?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’ve manipulated humans and Fae alike to leverage my acquisition of position, influence, and wealth.”
“And yet,” the gryphon said, stretching his wings. “You’ve twice been imprisoned, lost your only son, and been double-crossed by this Chesterfield person. Did it never occur to you that perhaps you were using your abilities for incorrect purposes?”
Brenna’s temper awakened, bringing green flame to her eyes.
“Now settle down,” Aquila said, unperturbed. “I merely wonder why, when you were told you could not bear children, that you did not trust the father of your child with the true story of how you came to be a witch. The baby you created together was, arguably, a miracle, was he not?”
“Hamish was a religious zealot,” Brenna snapped. “He was incapable of seeing me or any product of my body as a miracle.”
“His religious convictions apparently did not trouble you until his fear of you caused him to turn against you,” the gryphon replied.
Brenna had no answer for that.
“Did you think that when you emerged from that cave in the Orkneys that the best way to establish a relationship with your great-grandson was to murder his father?” Aquila went on. “Or that in following Alexander to America, you might have offered him more than his service as the progenitor of a magical lineage you planned to rule?”
“Alexander had nothing but fear for me,” Brenna said coldly.
“Because in your fear of ever being vulnerable again, you gave him and everyone else in your path ample reasons to fear you and none to love you,” Aquila said quietly. “Are you truly as evil as you would have us all believe? You have lived these many months in my home and been nothing but a gracious guest.”
“You saved my life,” Brenna said. “You allow me to remain here because I have nowhere else to go unless this is your way of telling me that I have outstayed my welcome.”
The gryphon’s beak clacked in consternation. “Now you are the one being ridiculous,’ he said. “You are welcome here as long as you like. I am merely suggesting that having been given a second chance at life, perhaps there are positions of mind and heart you might reconsider.”
Aquila let the matter drop for that evening, but then, weeks later, as he used one elegant talon to capture her rook with his bishop, Aquila put an intriguing question to Brenna.
“Would you not like to get the upper hand on this man Chesterfield and on the Hereditarium who persecuted your kind?” he asked.
“I thought your argument was that I needed to give people reason to love me,” Brenna said sardonically. “Did you show love to those who persecuted your kind?”
Aquila’s keen eyes regarded her patiently. “Had I so desired,” he said. “I could have killed many humans before coming to this place of exile, but I wanted only to be a teacher, a professor. It was, however, my misfortune to have been born into the age when humans began to turn their backs on magic. My form frightened them. While regrettable, human fear is not a punishable offense.”
“Isn’t it?” Brenna said. “Were not the humans the ones who tortured and burned witches?”
“Ah,” he said triumphantly, “so you do have feelings of camaraderie for natural practitioners.”
Brenna set her mouth in a firm line, annoyed at having been talked into such an admission. Finally, she said, “I am Hereditarium by birth. I told you that.”
“Brenna,” Aquila asked gently, “whom do you hate more? Your father or the humans?”
“Both equally,” she said stubbornly. “When my father was not being a tyrant, he worked with the Templars to safeguard the most precious artifacts of the magical world against the rising danger of destruction by the humans.”
“And because your magic failed to awaken, he regarded you as little more than human, is that correct?”
“Unlike most Fae, my father never had any affection for humans,” Brenna said in a rough voice. “He considered them to be impossibly inferior beings, more trouble than they were worth. His opinion of his defective daughter was no different.”
“You are not defective, Brenna,” Aquila said. “You have simply been disappointed by those whom you should have been able to trust. It is a deep wound, my dear, but it is not one that cannot be healed.”
That single conversation seeded her mind with an intriguing question. One so simple, she wondered why it had never occurred to her before. Was Creavit magic inherently evil by virtue of its source, or could the person who possessed that made power still exercise free will?
Even after a deal forged with the Darkness in the name of revenge, could Brenna still choose a different path? The very thought struck her as ludicrous, but the idea existed in her mind all the same.
As she continued to heal, and as her strength returned, Brenna made a place for herself in the strange territory of the In Between. Armed with her native abilities and aided by those who could help her access the technological rivers of information on which the human world thrived, she devised methods to watch Irenaeus Chesterfield and the Hamilton girl.
It was not long before Brenna discovered that her “death” had not been the consequence of mere bad luck.
Irenaeus used her to plant the Orb of Thoth in the fairy mound to disable the aos si. He’d never intended to break into the Valley of Shevington. His only goal was to deprive Jinx Hamilton of the company and counsel of her mentor. To that end, Brenna was completely expendable.
Since that time, Chesterfield had been quite the busy boy — playing games with vampires, manipulating time, kidnapping Jinx Hamilton’s brother. But as Brenna tracked the wizard’s movements, she saw, for the first time, that Irenaeus was, for all his great age, still little more than a malcontented teenager with a persecution complex — and rather a bumbling one at that.
This was the weakling to whom she had linked her plans? Those days were most certainly over, a
fact the wizard would understand when he discovered Brenna Sinclair was harder to get rid of than he imagined. Whether she chose a better path for herself in the future or not, Brenna’s first goal was to settle scores with Irenaeus Chesterfield.
11
Maybe it’s just me, but when evil, supposed-to-be-dead sorceresses appear in my dreams? I have trouble getting back to sleep. Tori? Not so much. She conked out on her end of the sofa right in the middle of my elegant theory about Dream Brenna being a metaphor.
Granted, it was a boring theory, but I still almost threw a pillow at Tori when a half-snort/half-snore interrupted my monologue. Seriously, I can’t really blame her for falling asleep on me mid-ramble. What I was saying didn’t even make sense to me.
I couldn’t claim on the one hand to see the Amulet of Caorunn and the thief who took it in my dreams, and then turn right around and deny the vision about Brenna Sinclair. Whether I liked it or not, Brenna appeared to be alive — in some place with giant eagles and little dudes with horns thus adding a whole new layer of strange to the situation.
Still, in the moment, I was annoyed enough at Tori to pick up a pillow and start to launch it at her head. Then I caught myself and just looked at my bestie, dead to the world with her arms wrapped around the comforter that usually stays draped over the back of the sofa.
The pose reminded me of the way Tori used to cling to her beat-up old Teddy bear — the one that still lives on the upper shelf of her bedroom closet. He comes out when no other means of comfort will suffice.
Regardless of the level of drama or danger we face, Tori never quits on me. Letting her get some sleep was the least I could do. We’d have to deal with the Brenna question soon enough, a fact that was likely to cause everyone to lose sleep.
As I got up to go, I thought, “It’s not like Brenna’s hiding outside the door waiting to grab me.”
The Amulet of Caorunn (A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 7) Page 8
