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I am bone.
I am flesh.
I am real.
Sion holds out hands in supplication. “’Tis one final bridge I’m begging you to cross with me.”
“Your lies destroyed that bridge in devastating purple and blue flames.”
The overhanging rock hides Máthair, but the pain in Sion’s expression transforms my heart into something as delicate as one of the sparkling, glass panes floating upon the lake. Through his green glass eyes, I see he is every bit as fragile. Gone is his brow-creasing frustration with me. In this final moment together, I know the cracks beginning in my battered heart end in his. The Veil sweeps around me, and I leave chimes and deceit behind.
In a handful of breaths, I’m leaning against the passenger door of the rental car inside the low stone wall surrounding Colleen’s grandmother’s house in Enniscorthy. Was it my own doing or Sion’s that sent the car and me here? As I press a hand to my heart, waiting for equilibrium to kick in, a shadowy form blocks my path to the front door.
“Alone I see.”
I gasp, prepared to bolt until I recognize Charlie in the faint glow of the porch light.
Chapter 22
The Colleague
I read somewhere that you don’t tremble when you’re actively in shock. It’s afterwards, when brutal awareness returns, the shakes set in. They wrack my body for the entire drive from Enniscorthy to our hotel in Dublin. Colleen is convinced my condition is related to my near tumble the morning after our Beltane bonfire. She insisted I let Jeremy lead the tour solo while I take a day to relax and recover. It wasn’t a hard choice to escape into the oblivion of sleep.
Except there is no escape.
Sion inhabits every corner of my subconscious, damn him.
In my dreams, we travel together through the Veil. We trace the stars with outstretched fingers. We laugh. We make love.
Before I let myself drift off, I feared nightmares of melting Veil walls, foxes baring pointy teeth, and shadow villains, but only sweet memories of a ruined love visit me.
Am I conjuring these, or is Sion still manipulating my psyche the way he and Máthair have done my whole life with hidden meanings in folk tales, dream flashes, and shadow stories in the fire?
The knock on the hotel room door in late afternoon isn’t loud but insistent. I channel my inner ten-year-old and pull the covers over my head in behavior unbecoming a college professor.
“Eala?”
My first instinct is to hunker down in my burrow of misery. The second is to escape out the window in case it’s Sion, ignoring my edict to bugger off.
Leave me out of the rest of your crazy story.
My mind roves despite my efforts to hobble it as a discordant litany drones through my head.
Eala, you accept the soulfall and traveling through time, but easily abandon the souls because Sion and Máthair betrayed you?
I run out of usable oxygen and fling the covers off my head.
The answers you’re looking for aren’t always the ones you want. Tír na nÓg would be ashamed. Finnbheara will strike you down. There’s nothing of the oak or the swan in you.
The more my mind or the persistent visitor hammers at me, the worse I feel. Instead of taking the hint, the knocking gets louder, but the voice is pitched too low to recognize. “Eala, are you awake?”
No accent, probably Charlie. After his midnight creeper performance last night, I’m not eager to hang with him alone in the land of the living even if it is at Colleen’s behest.
If I ever was a part of the living.
“Stop it, Eala. You are alive.”
“Pardon,” says the muffled voice from the hall.
