“Are you ready?” Jocelyn asked when I glanced his way after a nervous breath.
“I guess.” As ready as I was going to get, anyway.
He walked over to the desk against the wall next to me, reaching into his vest pocket as he went and pulling out a worn leather pouch. My throat tightened slightly when I finally saw the Iris as he drew it from the pouch and set it down on the desk with a gentle metallic
thunk
.
“Just take it slow and you’ll be fine,” he said to me quietly before turning back to the group. “Bastian, do you happen to know the date that Ciaran passed, or perhaps just a general timeframe to give her a starting point?”
“It was when you were in the States, right? So coming up on four years ago?” I asked, hoping we could get at least a little more specific than just the four months he spent in school with me or we might be there all night.
“It was November third,” he said confidently, though there was a hint of sadness there too.
I nodded and Jocelyn returned to his spot by the door and waited quietly with the others, while I looked down at the small hunk of metal and stone sitting on the desk waiting for me. Honestly, I hadn’t even seen the thing since that afternoon in Aimirgin Hall back at St Brigid’s when it both saved me and almost killed me, and much as I wanted to be able to play the role of tough chick in front of all the eyes I felt on me, I was having a hard time making my hand go near it.
“OK,” I sighed, trying to kick my bravado up a notch. “Here goes. If I inadvertently kill anyone, allow me to apologize ahead of time.”
“She’s kidding, right?” I heard Bastian whisper.
“Sure, sure,” Mr Anderson whispered back. Then after a pause added, “Though you may want to step back a bit… just in case.”
Great. Thanks Anderson.
Gritting my teeth I lifted my hand with every intention of grabbing hold of the thing and getting this over with, but against my will my fingers stopped shy and came to a rest on the surface of the table while I prayed that it looked to everyone else like I’d meant to do that and hadn’t chickened out. I could do this, damn it, I knew I could! Nothing was going to happen, nothing bad anyway, it was all just in my head. But frustratingly enough, knowing that something is only in your head doesn’t make it any easier to get past – even though it seems like it should.
My fingers twitched, trying to work up the nerve for their second try, when suddenly a shadow fell over the desk between my hand and the Iris and quickly shaped itself into script.
“
Don’t worry, Leannán. You’ve got this.
”
I smiled with a silent sigh as the words dissolved away as quickly as they came. I did have this. I might have been unsure, but Alex wasn’t, and even when I couldn’t totally count on myself, I knew I could always count on him. So long as he had my back, everything would be fine.
With Alex’s support to push me, I locked my stance, held my breath, reached out, and took the Iris.
CHAPTER 19
The effect was instantaneous. The barest touch of my finger on the Iris made the curtain of fog around my mind fall like a wet blanket, and in a blink, everything was as clear and bright as cut glass. I held my breath for a second as I waited for discomfort, or pain, or chaos, or any of the other things that had occurred at one point or another during my previous Iris encounters, but there was nothing. All I felt was a freeing clarity that felt as natural as breathing.
I scanned out around me with my newly heightened sense and felt the presence of the other abilities in the room, marveling at the change in them. The individual glows from each of them that were fuzzy only a moment ago, were now concentrated and crisp globes of radiating power. The difference in the before and after was like comparing a cotton ball to a marble. Or maybe stars would have been a better comparison, as now I was no longer limited to the five other Holders in the room, but to Holders across the country and beyond, each of their abilities spread out across my mind like stars in a clear night sky.
Charged up as I was, it took almost no effort at all to find Chloe’s ability and lock onto it. The Iris made the link between us strong as a steel cable, fusing our abilities together, charging and magnifying the gifts of time walking as they flowed into me, transforming me into a full-fledged Time Walker. I took the date Bastian provided and pushed it through my new ability and watched as the world around me shifted, this time with a smooth and confident transition that no longer felt fragile and shaky, but stable and strong.
As the room around me began to change and the day of Ciaran’s death came into view, the first thing I noticed was the considerable change in light. The curtain over the only window in the room was drawn, allowing only thin slivers of light in through the gaps in the fabric, while the only other light came from a small lamp with a dim bulb sitting on top of a chest of drawers. I turned to get a better look at the second half of the room and, after noting with relief that the images didn’t disappear the moment I moved my feet, I found that the largest changes in the scene had occurred on and around the desk and bed area. A plethora of pill bottles and other medical paraphernalia now lay strewn across the desktop, and what wouldn’t fit there was stacked on the desk chair and on the edges of several of the bookshelves. Around all the makings of the pseudo-pharmacy were piles of books, pens, papers, notebooks and all sorts of other things laying haphazardly in, on, and all over pretty much everything else in the room. In a word, it was a mess.
“Enough, you old shrew!” a voice rasped, making me jump. My head snapped toward the bed where a man was laying down as a woman stood over him, appearing to have just finished administering some sort of medication.
The woman tried to smile despite her obvious irritation. “If you’d be so kind as to hold yourself still, it wouldn’t be so difficult, Mr Shea.”
Mr Shea. It was him.
“Becca?” I heard Jocelyn’s voice call me from what now appeared to be only an empty patch of air. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” I whispered, then remembering that Ciaran and the woman weren’t really there and couldn’t hear me, I repeated in a normal speaking voice. “Yes. It worked, Ciaran’s here, I see him. There is a woman here too, his nurse I think. He’s,” I paused with a grin, “calling her names while she’s trying to give him a shot.”
“That sounds about right,” I heard Bastian chuckle quietly from his corner. “Old boy never did like to be tended to or fussed over.”
“Can you see anything on the nightstand to the right of the bed?” Jocelyn asked. “That is where he was writing in the memory.”
I stepped around the nurse who was gathering up her things from the edge of the bed. “No,” I said, scanning the tiny table, “nothing, just a glass of water.”
“There now,” the nurse said, piling some trash and empty dinnerware onto a tray. “You have a rest, and if the rain holds off, we can have a walk this afternoon.”
“I don’t want a bloody walk, now be gone woman!” Ciaran yelled from the bed, the effort of raising his voice winding him so much that he slumped back against his pillows as he tried to catch his breath.
“All right, all right,” the nurse sighed, shaking her head. “I’m going, don’t upset yourself.”
As the door clicked shut, I looked around, not sure what I should do. Since there was nothing on the nightstand as of yet, then I had to have arrived at a point in the day before he’d written the first portion of the prophecy, but what exactly did that mean? Was I going to have to just sit here for God knows how long and wait it out? Was there a fast forward feature to this time walking thing? Maybe if I–
“Sorry about that one,” Ciaran suddenly said as he stared blankly at the ceiling above his bed, still huffing and puffing a bit. “She has a tendency to prattle on.”
Who was he talking to? I looked around to see if there was someone else in the room that I had missed, but it was only him. Was he talking to himself? Praying out loud, maybe? They had said that he’d gone a little crazy toward the end; maybe he’d lost it and actually thought there was someone with him.
“Thirty seven after ten,” he continued, looking over to the clock that sat on one of the higher bookshelves. “That’s the time that very clock had on its face in the vision where I watched you arrive. That’s how I knew you’d come. How I know you’re here.”
Again I looked around. “Who’s here…?”
“What is it?” Jocelyn asked.
“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “He’s talking to someone.”
“I didn’t want to stay here, in this cottage,” Ciaran continued, “but when I saw this room, I knew that this was where I was supposed to be. I knew this was where you would come and I had to be here when you did. I’ve been waiting for you, Rebecca.”
My eyes popped open with a gasp as every hair on my body prickled. It was me –
he was talking to me
.
“What’s wrong?” I heard Jocelyn ask, but I shushed him quickly and stepped closer to Ciaran’s bed.
“Many months ago,” Ciaran went on, “I received a vision of your arrival. You used the Iris to enhance the ability you garnered from your friend in order to come and see me here. That is how I found out about you. About who you are and what you can do.”
“Oh my God… this is so creepy…” I breathed, barely believing what I was hearing.
“What’s happening?” Jocelyn asked again.
“He’s talking to me,” I told them all. “He’s actually talking to me. He knew we were coming and that I was going to find him.”
“Really?” Chloe whispered.
“What did he say?” Bastian asked.
“That’s incredible!” Anderson said.
I silenced them all with a quick raise of my hand just as Ciaran spoke again. “Not only do I know that you are here,” he continued, “but I also know why.” He reached under the blankets and pulled out a black book that was so old it looked as though it might fall apart at any moment. He opened the front cover and took out a small folded piece of paper, holding it out in front of him. “You came for this.”
He paused a moment, then reached up behind himself and took hold of the large round topper to the left hand post of his headboard and began to unscrew it until the entire wooden ball came off into his hand. He brought it down to rest in his lap, then rolled the little piece of paper he’d taken from the book and slid it into the hole on the bottom of the post head. “I have never read it,” he said, straining to return the post head to the top of the headboard, using all of his quickly waning strength to twist it back into place, “but I know it is what you have come for. It will still be in there waiting for you when you arrive,” he said, seeming oddly confident. With a raspy sigh, he sank back onto his pillows, once again winded and breathing heavily. “May it serve you well.” His eyelids began to fall. “Good luck Rebecca,” he whispered as the last of his energy seemed to give out.
My stomach tightened as I began to panic, only one thought rambling through my mind.
Oh God, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, I cannot stand here and watch someone die without completely freaking out, please don’t die…
But to my immense relief, instead of stopping, his breathing simply transformed from the shallow puffs of exhaustion, to the long, deep draws of sleep.
With my fear subsided and my adrenaline pumping, I couldn’t get back to reality fast enough. My only thought: getting into that bed knob. I plunked the Iris down on the desk, instantly snapping the heightened strength of my ability and shattering the scene around me, hurling me back in to the present day. As I stumbled backward from the force of the transition, Jocelyn caught my arm at the last second, keeping me upright as I got my bearings once again.
“What happened?” came the first of the tumult of questions that were all too jumbled together for me to even put names to the voices.
“What did he tell you?”
“Are you all right?”
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Did he really know you were there?”
Back in control of my motor skills – though still blinking somewhat spasmodically – and momentarily ignoring the other five people in the room, I hurried over to the bed and began twisting the round post head off of the frame. It was tight at first, but quickly gave way and began to spin, up, up, up, until it teetered and fell off into my hand. Holding my breath, I peered down into the small threaded hole at the base of the knob, praying that the tiny piece of paper would still be in there.
“What in bloody hell is going on?” Anderson asked, everyone else in the room having fallen into a confused silence.
“What’s going on,” I answered with a smile, as I stuck my finger into the hole and pulled out the folded coil of paper, “is that I am getting us what we need.”
“How…” Bastian whispered through the line of stunned faces, “how did you know that was in there?”
“Ciaran told me,” I said, tossing the knob onto the bed. “I watched him put it in there for me to find. He told me that he didn’t know what it said, but that it was what I wanted.”
“He’d known you would be there?” Jocelyn asked, sounding impressed though not entirely surprised.
“Yes,” I nodded as I walked over to join the group and began slowly unrolling and unfolding the note. “He said he’d had a vision months before where he’d seen me use the Iris and time walk back to see him, and he said that this,” I paused, finally getting the paper open, “was what I had come for.”
I passed the note off to Jocelyn who read it aloud. “
Look into the shew and find the origin…
”
“That’s all?” Anderson asked.
“That’s all,” Jocelyn answered. “If this is the first portion of the prophecy I saw him complete in the memory, then the entire thing would read:
Look into the shew and find the origin that will pierce the shroud of my sight
.”
“Great,” I grumbled, “can’t just be easy, can it?”
“Actually,” Bastian shrugged, “it’s more straightforward than Seers’ prophecies usually are.”
“Straightforward? How is that straightforward? And what’s a
shew
? Not like… you know,” I raised my foot, “a shoe, right?”
“No,” Bastian chuckled, to which I glared. “It’s a shew stone, or seer stone. Seers use them to help see certain visions more clearly. Think of it like an antenna.”
“So,” Alex cut in, “if I’m understanding this, it sounds as though all we need to do is find this shew stone, and it will tell us how to read Ciaran’s notes?”
“Hang on now,” Anderson said, rubbing his head. “How do we even know that this is actually what we were after? I thought you said that he wrote the first part of the prophecy earlier the day he died?”
“That was simply my suspicion,” Jocelyn said. “I was never certain. If Ciaran knew Becca would be there to hear him and he went to all that trouble to leave this where he knew she would find it, then he had to know that this is what we need.”
“The two parts do make sense as a whole,” I allowed, though I still wasn’t thrilled with the riddle-esque structure of it.
“But then,” Anderson continued, “when did he write that second bit that you saw? And how could he possibly not have known what was written on that scrap of paper if he’d wrote it himself?”
“The portion of the prophecy I saw him write must have come to him later on that day, or perhaps that night. As for why he didn’t know what was on this,” he lifted the paper, “it’s hard to say.”
“It could have been a trance,” Bastian suggested. “Ciaran went into a trance at least once a week all in the time that I knew him.”
“Then that’s likely it,” Jocelyn agreed.
“Wait, what’s a trance?” I asked.
“Seers often put themselves into a trance state to receive more concentrated and powerful visions. That is when they would also make use of their shew stone,” Jocelyn explained.
“Ciaran would stare into the thing for hours on end, while one of his hands wrote continuously, almost working separately from the rest of his body. He would often fill whole pages of his journal in just one sitting.”
There was a long pause, then finally Jocelyn folded the paper back up and tucked it into his pocket. “I believe Alex is right,” he said. “We need to find Ciaran’s shew.”
“I have it,” Bastian said, “or, rather, my parents do. They kept it after he passed, as they considered it to be an artifact of Bhunaidh history. It is locked in the vault at our family estate. I could have it delivered to Adare in a day or two tops, though,” he grimaced, “for that I will need my father’s permission...” He sighed, brushing off his sudden worry. “But not to worry, I can come up with something to tell him without rousing suspicion.”
“Good,” Jocelyn nodded slowly.
“But will that do us any good?” Alex asked. “I thought that shew stones only worked for the Seers they were made for. Even another Seer shouldn’t be able to see anything in his stone.”
“It’s true,” Bastian agreed, “I’ve seen Ciaran’s stone myself, and I’ve never seen anything.”
“Well, Ciaran seemed to believe that there was something there to be seen, and in any case, it is still the most natural next step for us to take. Perhaps all that is needed is a clear idea of what we are looking for, which,” he patted his pocket, “now we do.” Did we? I certainly had no idea what he’d meant by “origin,” but I let it go. “Or,” Jocelyn continued, “maybe there is in fact nothing, and this will all turn out to be no more than a dead end. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that the only way to get to them is to have a look at this shew for ourselves and see what there is to see.”
He looked as though he was going to say more, but it was at that moment I felt the faintest tickle of two new abilities against my mind. They were abilities that I knew didn’t belong to anyone in the room, and they were growing stronger by the second. Sucking in a sharp breath, I snapped my head toward the window, every nerve in my body on edge. “Someone’s coming,” I said, and immediately every eye in the room flew to me then the window, then back to me.