CHAPTER 14
It was them – the dead people. I was sensing the abilities of the dead.
“Oh God,” I breathed, stumbling backwards until I hit the car. “Oh God, oh God…”
“What’s wrong?” Alex asked, rushing over as I pressed my palms to my forehead.
“Oh my,” Cormac said, putting a hand on my back. “You can feel them, can’t you, dear?”
I nodded without looking up, worried what might come out of my mouth if I opened it. I wanted to keep it together, but the feel of decaying abilities swirled around me, clinging like spider webs as I tried to swat them away. Their eerie echoes wafted through my mind like ghosts, turning my blood to ice water in my veins.
With my eyes squeezed shut I did my best to maintain control, until I felt a pair of hands gently but firmly take hold of my shoulders. “Becca,” I heard Jocelyn call over the chill in my head. “Becca, look at me.” I lowered my hands and looked up, hoping he didn’t notice how much they were shaking. “Listen to me,” he said softly, “I want you to forget about everything else you feel, and focus on the three of us. Concentrate on our abilities and let the rest fall into the background.”
I did what he said, directing all my attention to his, Cormac’s, and Alex’s presences in my mind. They were clear, bright, and strong, but more than anything they were familiar. Next to their vivid glow, the rest of the brushes on my mind were muted and dull, like flashlights glowing under a blanket. Keeping my concentration on the living, I opened my eyes slowly, letting my focus calm me and ease the anxiety crawling across my skin.
“I know it’s difficult,” he continued, the empathy thick in his voice, “but what you are sensing from the others… you can’t think of them as abilities. Their true abilities died with them, just as their thoughts and memories did. You are only feeling the shadows that those things left behind for us to find. Think of them as diaries these people might have kept or letters they may have written – they were made by them and left behind; they are not a part of them.”
I let his words resonate, allowing them to relax my heart rate as they sank in. Somehow he’d known exactly what to say, and as I finally regained control of myself and pushed the echoes safely to the background of my thoughts, I don’t think I’d ever been more grateful. But then I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The empathy in his eyes as he spoke had told me that he knew the fear and panic I was feeling all too well, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. He’d been alive over two hundred years, God only knows the things he’d been through in all that time. He’d said that he fought in the First World War; had he struggled to ignore the thoughts of the dying on the battlefield? How many cries for help had he been forced to hear without being able to answer? Had there been someone there to help him when it all got to be too much? Again I realized just how little I knew about him, but for the first time I found myself truly wanting to learn more.
But now was obviously not the time, so instead I met his eyes with the barest of smiles. “Thank you,” I breathed, happy to have my feet solidly back under me.
He nodded before releasing me and stepping back, but still looked wary. “Stay with her,” he said, glancing at Alex who was back at my side a moment later.
“No,” I protested, as Jocelyn turned to leave without him. “You need him with you. What if someone comes?”
“I can hide them from here,” Alex said.
“Not as easily. I’m fine now, really. We can all go together,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “I mean it, I’ll be fine.”
They all looked hesitant, but I kept my head high and hoped they would buy my confidence, only a portion of which was hyperbole. I’d been the one who insisted on coming out here with them in the first place so I could prove that I was capable and didn’t need to be handled with kiddie gloves when things got rough, and that was still what I intended to do. Admittedly it hadn’t gone well thus far, but in my defense the whole “sensing the dead” thing was a twist I hadn’t seen coming. But minor freak-out aside, the outing wasn’t over yet, which meant there was still time for me to buck up and save face.
After a long moment, Jocelyn finally agreed. “All right,” he said, looking me over once more then shooting Alex a blatant “keep an eye on her” glance. “Let’s go.”
We walked through the gates and into the perfectly manicured yard, following Cormac toward the section of plots that Ciaran was supposedly in. As we passed by headstone after headstone, I noticed that they were all very similar to one another, while at the same time very different from anything I’d ever seen before. They were very tall – most looked to be over five feet – with large, amazingly detailed Celtic crosses making up the top portion of the stone. Each cross was ornately carved with knot work and other Celtic and religious symbols, all fashioned in the same ancient style, so that they coordinated perfectly with one another while each one still remaining entirely unique.
However, beyond the intricate gothic stonework, there was something else that stood out about the gravestones, which was the lettering on their faces. The first line of text was the person’s name, as would be expected. But beneath that, where you would normally find the years of birth and death and maybe a denotation from surviving loved ones, like “Beloved Husband” or “Honored Father,” there was only one single word on each of the stones, written in Gaelic.
“What are those?” I asked Alex as we fell slightly behind Jocelyn and Cormac. “The words under each of their names on the markers?”
“Their abilities.”
“Ah.” Guess I should have figured. If ability was the most important thing to these people in life, why not in death?
“Reader… Caster… Healer…” Alex began reading, nodding at each of the stones as we passed. “Reader… Kinetic… Discerner… Alchemist… Porter… Another Reader… Mentalist…”
“Wait,” I asked, recognizing the word. “What is that? Someone called me that last night.”
“Well sure, that is what they all think you are. A Mentalist is someone who can practice Mentalism. You know, like Jocelyn: mindreading, thought control, that sort of thing.”
“Really? I’ve never heard him called that. I didn’t even realize it had a name.”
“Sure it does. Though,” he admitted, “you probably wouldn’t have heard Jocelyn called that, or at least not often. Most Mentalists are only able to manipulate one facet of the mind, but since Jocelyn has control over all the mental aspects, it kind of puts him in a league of his own. But Ryland is considered a Mentalist.”
“And why aren’t the years on the stones?” I asked as we continued up the path.
“To hide their ages. Holders are the only ones buried here, but that doesn’t mean that they are the only ones who visit.”
“Right,” I nodded, having not considered that a cemetery filled with stones all claiming to belong to people hundreds of years old when they died might raise a few eyebrows. “I guess that’s smart.”
“It should be…” Cormac said, pausing up ahead and scanning the nearby headstones. “Ah, there,” he pointed to a large stone at the end of the path.
It was one of the largest I’d seen in the whole cemetery, with a towering stone cross sitting atop the elaborately carved base stone, framed by two life-sized angel statues on either side like beautifully intimidating guardians. Their weatherworn faces held an unsettling expression that hovered between serene and menacing, while their wings were poised just shy of open as though they could spring to life and fly off at any moment. Even the path itself seemed to service only this one monument, turning abruptly at its foot then looping all the way around the plot before meeting back up with itself like a lasso. I leaned in as we approached the island of grass and read the script inlayed on the face of the headstone.
Ciaran Oengus Shea
Fáidh
“Wow,” I whispered, admiring the grandeur of the scene. “He must have had a lot of money.”
“Unlikely,” Cormac said. “Bhunaidh like Ciaran who have no family at the time of death have their departing arrangements handled by the head family. When this sort of thing,” he motioned to the monument, “is done, it usually denotes someone with either a high standing in Bhunaidh society, or, as I would wager is the case here, an extremely rare or exalted ability.”
We all stood quietly at the edge of the path for a moment before Jocelyn sighed quietly and stepped up onto the grass. He took a knee a few feet from the headstone and bowed his head, staring unseeing at the grass in front of him, while Alex, Cormac, and I hung back on the path and waited.
And waited…
…and waited.
I had never actually seen a mind reading done, but as the minutes began to tick by, I started to wonder just how long something like this normally took. Did it always take a while, or was this one harder because the person he was reading was dead? Was he having trouble? Alex and Cormac didn’t seem worried, so should I just relax and wait it out? Probably. Was it OK to lean against one of the nearby headstones when my legs started getting tired? Probably not.
Round about the ten minute mark, and just before I had a chance to really get antsy, the stiff tension in Jocelyn’s form broke and his shoulders dropped.
“Anything?” Cormac asked.
Jocelyn shook his head, rubbing his eyes like he was massaging a headache. “No. Or at least nothing I can make out. There are fragments of something toward the end of his life, but there is so little it’s like trying to reach out and grab smoke.”
Cormac took a step toward him. “Could you see if anyone has been here before us? Was anything tampered with or changed at all?”
“No,” Jocelyn answered, “there were no signs of anyone else even so much as having tried to read him. We are the first. Not that it’s done us any good,” he added with a frustrated scoff.
“Well,” Cormac said, attempting to lighten the mood, “at least we tried. And now we can rest assured that no one else will be able to garner anything from Mr Shea, so all in all, not a wasted trip.”
But Jocelyn wasn’t ready to leave. “I want to give it one more go,” he said, rubbing his hands over his face then turning back toward the grave.
Cormac frowned, walking up beside him. “Jocelyn, enough. You’ve done what you can, there is no need to give your mind a beating over it.”
“No,” Jocelyn snapped, “there is something there…” He paused sighing heavily, shame suddenly hanging on his brow. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to–”
“It’s nothing,” Cormac cut him off quietly, clapping him gently on the arm with a smile, “it’s nothing.”
As I watched the simple exchange between the two men, I saw something in Jocelyn that I would never have thought I’d see. It was something I doubted that many others would have even recognized, but I knew it the moment I saw it in his eyes – because I had seen it so many times in my own.
It was burden.
It was the weight of being special. The pressure of knowing that he was the second most powerful Holder on earth, and the belief that as such he
should
have been able to do this, but he couldn’t. It was the fear of disappointing everyone who was counting on him, worried that he might let us down.
Yeah, I knew all about that – I felt it every day. Jocelyn might have been the second most powerful Holder, but if those damned prophecies were true, then I was the first. I was the one who was supposed to bring an end to Darragh, and save Holder kind, and a bunch of other stuff I’d basically blocked out and buried. But just because I’d gotten really good at ignoring my so-called destiny, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t always there, hovering in the back of my mind, sprinkling every one of my thoughts with just the tiniest hint of fear and self-doubt. For the time being I was able to fight it, but deep down I knew a day would come where I wouldn’t be able to beat it back anymore.
“We came all the way out here,” Jocelyn continued. “I should at least give it one more try.”
With an encouraging nod, Cormac came back to join Alex and I on the path while Jocelyn took a deep breath and reassumed his position over the grave. I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do. He was the only one who could even attempt to do a memory reading like this, and even if we could find someone else, they wouldn’t be as powerful as Jocelyn nor would we have any idea whether or not we could actually trust them. If only there was a way to add to Jocelyn’s power and maybe… give him a boost…
But maybe… Could I…?
Without taking the time to think it through, I gently reached out toward Jocelyn’s ability, melding it with my own. This would normally be the point when I would be able to assume the ability of the person I was connected to, but due to a block Min had placed on my scaith, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to draw his ability into me… but could I push mine out to him?
I focused on the glow of Jocelyn’s ability in my mind, but instead of pulling it toward me as I normally would, I began to funnel my own power into it as slowly and carefully as I could, feeling the two energies swirl together and change, like pouring red punch into lemonade. As I watched the globe of power grow, I got excited. Was it working? Had I really–
“
Gah!
” Jocelyn suddenly gasped, his whole body pitching forward as his hands fisted the grass.
Oh God, what had I done?
Immediately I broke all connection with him and stumbled backward, terrified he was hurt. “I’m sorry!”
“Oh my!” Cormac cried out, reaching for Jocelyn.
“I’m fine,” Jocelyn assured him, breathless. “I’m fine. It was just all at once… there was so much…”
“What happened?” Alex asked, putting his arm around me as I stood motionless, my hands shaking.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered again. “I didn’t mean to… I’m… I’m sorry…”
Jocelyn looked up at me, still clutching the ground. “That…” he asked, attempting to catch his breath. “That was you?” I couldn’t decide if the look in his eyes was shock, fear, or awe, but in any event I didn’t like it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just… thought it might help…”
“It did,” he said, squinting almost as if he was confused by his own words. He stood slowly, glancing at the grave then back to me. “Do it again.”