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“Nope. That’s why my dad took it to a jeweler once and had it inspected. They thought maybe it was handmade and didn’t get stamped.”
“No. That’s not it at all. It’s because when this ring was made, the 925 marking hadn’t been created,” she absently confirmed. Concern furrowed her brow, and her pale blue gaze hit mine. “This is the ring of Lugh.”
I shot her a suspicious glance.
“Uh, yeah. That’s my family’s legend—that it belonged to a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann—Lugh.” I huffed a disbelieving laugh, because it was kind of a joke to me. My brother had been pissed that I got it, but it was meant for the oldest son. Though none of us really knew why.
“He was believed to be an all-wise and all-seeing deity—he represented the sun and light,” she added with an odd expression. “Lugh was also a warrior, smith, craftsman, poet, artist, and sorcerer. Some say he was the sun god. He was said to have wielded an unstoppable fiery spear.”
“That’s what they say,” I agreed, my smile dropping as I tried to process what was going on. “When you get something with the kinds of legends associated with this ring, you research. Not because you believe it, but because it’s interesting and well… you kind of wonder if the story you’ve been told has ever been recorded anywhere,” I admitted.
With a trembling hand, she set it on the table in front of me and drew her hand back as if she’d been burned. I picked up the ring and studied it before slipping it back on. The heat from her holding it made my finger tingle where it rested.
“My family had a story about Lugh as well.”
“They did? Was your family Gaelic?” I asked, surprised. Not that she couldn’t have been of Gaelic origin, but she struck me as something more ethereal. Like she’d been a secret child of faeries.
She shook her head. “No, they weren’t.”
I scratched my chin and stared at the ring a moment.
She glanced at it on my finger before she spoke again.
“My mother told me stories as a child that I thought were nothing but bedtime stories. Then I recently found a story written by one of my ancestors. The story my family documented was that Rhiannon actually met Lugh when she was a young woman. Before she met King Pwyll. They were in human form, and neither knew who the other was… they fell in love. When the Fae found out, Rhiannon and Lugh were brought before them and forbidden to be together. You see, Lugh already resided in the Tír na nÓg—the Land of the Young, or the otherworld. It wasn’t allowed. He’d already sired a child while on one of his visits to the mortal world and they weren’t happy.”
When she mentioned Rhiannon and Lugh, something inside me tensed, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. It was as if I was preparing for an explosion. “Okay?”
“Evidently, during the Salem witch trials, my family needed to escape. We were the protectors of the scrolls, and that was an important responsibility. In order to have safe passage out of the area, my generations-ago grandmother made a deal with the Fae that she would give up part of her powers or allow her powers to be muted—we’re really not sure exactly which—if she and her family were able to escape Salem. They were happy to take her powers, but my great-grandmother, with lots of extra greats in there, added a caveat to the agreement. She said if ever a virgin daughter of Rhiannon mated with a demigod son of Lugh, then the family’s powers would be restored. The sad story of their ill-fated love had been passed down with the scrolls, and my a-million-times-removed grandmother had a romantic heart. The Fae have always been cunning and master manipulators, so they agreed because they foolishly thought that would never happen for the same reason Rhiannon and Lugh couldn’t be together to begin with—the Fae didn’t like others crossing into the mortal world. Though it was okay for them. According to the story, what they didn’t anticipate was that the descendants would be able to physically mate because they are genetically more human. Like the Fae, I never believed the story.” She chewed nervously on the corner of her lip.
“Call me an idiot, but I don’t get it,” I told her, though in the back of my mind, panic niggled. It was as if a small part of me knew and recognized the truth in her story.
“I think you do,” she murmured.
“There’s no way. Surely, you aren’t saying that’s us,” I argued. That was crazy talk. Right? It was purely a coincidence that I met her. We lived states apart. I hadn’t planned to come down here. I volunteered the night before Voodoo was planning on leaving.
“You can create or control fire? Because I never saw a lighter with those candles.”
I raked my teeth over my lower lip. Then, with a sigh, I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, and a small flame appeared. I bumped it over to my opposite palm, where it flickered, then grew until it shot up at least six inches from my hand. As I tipped and tilted my hand, it appeared to dance. Once I brought it back down, I rolled it through my fingers like a coin, then extinguished it in my fist.
“Besides being incredibly fascinating, you understand that’s right along the lines of what a descendant of Lugh would be able to do?” Her brow furrowed, and her pale gaze bounced from my right eye to my left, to the right and back.
“Fine, let’s say this legend—”
“Prophecy.”
“Whatever. Let’s say it’s true. How could we possibly know that’s me and you?” I asked, baffled at the pure insanity of this conversation. Sure, I had a certain ability. Many of my brothers in the RBMC Ankeny, Iowa chapter had abilities as well. This seemed over-the-top crazy, and I was having a helluva time wrapping my head around it.
“Until we slept together, I wasn’t able to conjure things up from nothing. I could do little things. Flip a light switch, remove dust, clean my counters, move small objects, nothing big. Now I say I want food andbam,there it is. We needed light and water, and we had it. How do you explain that?”
“Maybe you didn’t know you could do stuff like that before,” I offered as an explanation. The expression on my face had to give away that I didn’t believe that for a second.
She stood up and glanced around the room. Then her face screwed up in concentration. A scraping sound started, then all the chairs that were still on the tables flew to the walls and bounced off. There were a couple that sat there rocking on their side before they fell over with a clatter. Sloane seemed more irritated than anything.
“Did you do that?” Why I asked, I had no idea because it had to be her.
“Yeah, but I was trying to stand them up.” The frown on her face as she crossed her arms was cuter than anything, and I fought a grin, though I couldn’t keep the corner of my mouth from lifting.
“You think it’s funny?” she questioned with exasperation in her tone and a baffled expression on her beautiful face.
