Page 2 of Why Broken Wings Fray

“Mag Mell,” he began, “they go to Mag Mell.”

“Mag Mell,” I repeated, remembering Niamh referring to such a place. “What is it?”

“Sanctuary. Paradise. A freedom from the heavy burden of living offered to the fair folk or those who die with honour at their side.”

My brows pressed against one another as I stared at my strange bird-dragon. “What about… What about their souls? Do they… haunt people?”

I gulped. I had been playing around with this idea the last few months, but Urram was right – Google did not have the answers when I searched for it.

My search history looked something like this:

What happens to dead pixies?

Do pixies get to keep their souls when they die?

Are there pixie ghosts?

And, Do pixies have souls?

All of the above was earning me no traction on the search engine.

Urram’s beady, black eyes blinked a few times. “No.”

I blew out a breath of relief. While I couldn’t decide how I felt about the constant lingering of Raegan around me at all times – I knew for a fact that I didn’t want him dead.

It might have just been easier to admit to Urram what was going on. Except I knew exactly how that conversation would have gone, because he would have said what he said almost daily since we relocated to Cornwall. Which was, “We shouldn’t be here. You are tempting yourself.”

If he knew that I was day-dreaming, actually dreaming, and drowning in memories and ghosts of Raegan, he would have demanded we move back. And for the first time I might have been inclined to agree with him.

But every time I had that thought, there was a pain in my chest. Not a sharp pain or a dull pain, not a throbbing nor a zap. It was a tightening, as if an anvil had been placed over my heart and more and more and more weight was being applied. My lungs started to flatten, forcing me to gulp air down by the mouthful, until I was dizzy and passing-out became a very real fear.

I didn’t know what that feeling was, either. And I certainly would not ask Urram.

~

I floated along, day-to-day, not so different to how life had been prior to Saoghal. I went to the clinic and spent my days covered in blood not of pixies but of poodles and ragdolls, all the while with a dragon-turned-parrot lingering in the staff room and swearing at me on my lunch break.

I had promised Raegan I would never return to Saoghal. I promised I would never seek him out, even though every corner I turned had his face and smell and touch in the dark shadows.

I had intended to keep to that promise, too. I really wasn’t going to seek him nor Saoghal out. Other than the four-petalled aotrom that I kept on a necklace around my neck and the dragon that preened himself on my kitchen-table – I was going to let Saoghal become a distant memory.

Saoghal came for me, instead.

2

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No matter how many times I told Urram that, as a parrot, he shouldn’t be eating bowl after bowl of red meat, he wouldn’t listen to me. He refused his chop – tossing the silverware across my kitchen and sending a spray of green things through the air. Then, he stood at the edge of my kitchen-counter and screamed, all hours of the day, until I opened the freezer and let him have his pick of bloody things.

After a while, I stopped trying to warn him. He was a dragon, not a child, and as such could make those decisions for himself. He was a couple millennia old – if not older – and I had better things to do than to argue with him at five-a.m. every morning over a drumstick.

Which meant that Urram regularly got sick. It took everything in me on those days to resort from scoffing at him and telling him I told you so.

Most of the time, it fell on Saturday mornings. That was only because on Friday nights I aimed to drink as much red wine as I could, until I was sure my blood was the very colour of plum, and in the process Urram would sneak to the freezer and prove that he had learned how to open it himself.

For the first time, though, Urram got sick on a Wednesday. Smack in the middle of winter.

The brief drive through the countryside without him perched on my dash, smashing his beak against the console to the beat of the radio, had filled me with such an eerie loneliness that I almost contemplated driving back home and calling in sick. But I promised myself when I left Saoghal that I would not let my mind dive so quickly into the depths. Just as Killian had once told me – one had to want to see the good. There wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t aim to live by that little mantra.