Authors: Debbie Johnson
‘I sensed more than that,’ said Carmel, shoulders shaking in the cold. ‘I felt … like you were going to explode. What the fuck happened?’
I stared at them both, and bit my lip so hard I lost a chunk. Bugger.
‘Let’s go inside. We’re all freezing,’ I said, walking towards the cottage, leaving them trailing behind me.
Once inside, Fionnula walked into the kitchen and straight to the door I now recognised as the Cupboard of Booze, and grabbed a bottle of whisky with a very old-looking label. Looked like she was pulling out the big guns.
Carmel wrapped her arms around herself, still shuddering, looking at me uncertainly.
‘OK,’ I said, hanging the drenched coat on the back of the kitchen door. ‘I suppose I have to explain.’
‘Too fucking right,’ she said, which made three ‘fucks’ in the last three sentences. That was a lot, even for her.
‘And I will,’ I replied. ‘But after that, Fionnula is going to answer a few questions of her own, and then we’re going back to Dublin. Straight away.’
I heard Fionnula gulp, and didn’t know if it was anxiety of just half a bottle of whisky going down.
‘For a little while now, I’ve been hearing voices. Well, one voice to be precise: Fintan’s.’
‘How long has this been going on?’ asked Fionnula, peering at me from under her finely plucked blonde eyebrows. I knew she’d suspected I was hiding something, so she didn’t look as shocked as she could have. Don’t suppose you live to be 420 years old and still shock easily.
‘Since I went to the Otherworld. And not all the time, just occasionally. He … tells me things. He told me he’d call off the men who were chasing me, and he did. He told me he’d allow me free will, and he has. I know he’s the big bad guy – I feel it myself – but he’s done nothing to hurt me.’
‘Have these conversations continued while you were in my home, in my sanctuary?’ she said, eyes blazing. I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of that temper, immortal or not.
‘No. Not at all. Your territory wasn’t breached. I had to … cross the boundary. I climbed over the stile and into the next field.’
I didn’t want to elaborate on that because, well, it was frankly embarrassing. Big tough goddess-girl falls at the first hurdle. Maybe Gabriel was right to have surrounded me with secret squirrel bodyguards for the whole of my life. I was clumsy in every possible way: saying the wrong thing, tripping over my own feet, climbing over stiles and laying myself bare to shady Otherworld henchmen. I was rubbish at this.
‘And why would you be doing that, now? Climbing over the stile when I distinctly remember telling you not to leave my land?’ asked Fionnula, her voice deceptively soft and Irish. I ignored her. It wasn’t relevant. And I didn’t want to tell.
‘Ha!’ said Carmel, her shakes finally subsiding, pointing one long, dark-skinned finger at my already blushing face. ‘How did he get you? Free Easter Egg? Labrador puppies wrapped in ribbon? New Stone Roses album?’
‘Kitten,’ I muttered, keeping my voice low in the hope she wouldn’t hear me and would forget all about it. Fat chance.
‘That’s pathetic,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Truly pathetic. You need to buck your ideas up, or you’re going to get yourself killed. And I won’t be able to do a thing to stop it. You understand?’
I looked into her eyes, at her furrowed brow, her clenched fists. Jesus. She was serious. I was getting a proper telling-off from my best and only friend, my best and only Champion. And even worse, she was right, and I knew it.
‘All right,’ I said, nodding. ‘I understand. I’ll be more careful. And maybe you and Connor can teach me to fight, or something. I’m sorry.’
She nodded abruptly, and a splatter of rain fell from her hair on to the floor. She was letting me off lightly. For now.
‘What did he say, anyway?’ she asked.
‘Well, that’s the interesting part. And that’s where Fionnula comes in.’
I turned to face her. She met my gaze with a lot of attitude, which was fair enough: I was in her home, under her protection, and I was about to give her a bloody hard time. She knew it was coming – I could tell from the set of her shoulders and the way her chin was pointing out and up at a strange angle, trying to compensate for the fact that she was four inches shorter than me. Fionnnula’s battle stance.
‘I want the truth. I don’t want any excuses, or any sugar-coating. You’re supposed to be Switzerland, and I don’t want any more lies or evasions. You will answer me honestly, Fionnula the Fair, or I will walk right out of this cottage, off your land and back to Fintan. One more lie, and I’ll be his. All of this will be over. Do you believe me?’
‘I believe you, Goddess. I hear the truth in your words,’ she said, her tone still defiant. ‘And I will do as you ask – but be aware that the truth is never simple. Never absolute. There is always more than one version of any truth.’
‘That’s bollocks,’ I replied. ‘And you’re preparing me for something you know I don’t want to hear, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe I am, Lily. And maybe I’m right – maybe you don’t want to hear it. Maybe it would do you no good to hear it.’
‘I’m sick and tired of other people deciding what is good for me, and what isn’t. I’ve spent my whole life under the shadow of strangers conspiring to decide my fate, and now it stops. Today, it stops. Now answer me this: did you train my sisters, and help them control their visions? I only need a one-word answer to that, by the way.’
Carmel had gone silent and still, weighing up the heavyweight tension in the room. This was between Fionnula and me, and she sensed it.
Fionnula stared at me, her eyes glinting like ice-cold crystal. Her coral-painted lips were clamped shut, as though she was trying to stop the words from escaping.
‘Answer me. Or I will leave. I mean it. I am the Goddess, and there is nothing you could do to stop me. One word. Yes or no.’
‘Yes!’ she finally said, in a whisper that still seemed to fill the room.
‘And they were about seven or eight?’
She nodded, one swift plunge of her head, as though even that affirmation caused her pain.
‘And that was normal – that’s what you would usually do? I remember you telling me that you were teaching me later than you’d like, that in normal circumstances you’d have preferred a younger mind to mould. So, why not me – why wasn’t I sent for training? Why was I the only one left with the bastard visions?’
‘You were the only one left alive!’ she hissed. ‘Gabriel had to keep you hidden. He couldn’t risk sending you here to me; it would have exposed you.’
I rolled the thought around in my mind, analysing what she’d said, and – more importantly – what she’d carefully left out. Witchy bitch indeed. I was up against centuries of cleverness.
‘I accept that,’ I replied, trying to sound calm despite the mounting hysteria inside me. ‘But why didn’t you come to me? I’m sure Gabriel in all his Greatness could have arranged that. You, with your vast experience of sneaking around, could have managed that. Why didn’t you come to me, and teach me? Didn’t you want to, Fionnula?’
‘It wasn’t that,’ she said. I could swear I saw tears in her eyes, and wondered why. Maybe she was like me and cried when she was angry.
‘What was it, then? Was it him? Did Gabriel order you to stay away? Did he want to keep me the way I was, leave me crippled by my visions? Is that what happened?’
‘I told you there is nothing absolute about truth! It’s complicated, and I won’t be forced into guessing his motives!’ she screeched, throwing her whisky glass across the room so hard it smashed dramatically against the white wall, splashing amber fingers over the paintwork.
I recognised it for what it was: both an expression of frustration, and an attempt to distract me. It wouldn’t work.
‘Fionnula. Answer my question. Did Gabriel tell you to leave me alone, to leave me with my visions? Did he forbid you from helping me? One word only. That’s all I need.’
She sagged back against the kitchen counter like a popped balloon, suddenly devoid of all fight. She stared at the floor, and the tears finally spilled over, a steady stream falling to the kitchen floor. A pause. A deep, shuddering breath.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
One word. One small word that changed everything.
Fionnula went quiet after that. I’d expected her to try to talk me out of it, to explain, to plead Gabriel’s case. Instead, she agreed to drive us back to Dublin and watched silently as we packed up our belongings. I guess she really was Switzerland.
In the car, she stayed sullen, driving with abandon around hairpin bends with nothing but a rickety fence separating us from the cliffs below. Clearly I was going to have to get used to the way these supernatural types treated a car.
‘Nothing to say?’ I asked, finally, clinging on to my seat belt for dear life. ‘No impassioned speeches about my duty to save the frigging world?’
‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘This is between you and Cormac Mor now. I’ve already said too much.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, hearing the bitterness seep from my own voice like acid burning through my soul. ‘I don’t think you’ve said anywhere near enough. For starters, I need you to tell me how to stop getting these visions when people touch me. I don’t want to see anyone else’s future, ever again. Fix it.’
She braked so suddenly I jerked forward, the breath knocked out of me as the seat belt tightened around my stomach. In the back I heard a quiet ‘oof’ as Carmel’s head banged against my seat. I peered out into the darkness through the windscreen, and saw a solitary fox wander out in front of us, its eyes shining opal in the headlights. A quizzical twist of its tail and it was gone.
‘I can’t just fix it,’ she said, immediately hitting the accelerator again and going from a dead stop to sixty in what felt like zero seconds. I needed to get some of that G-force training astronauts have.
‘Maybe not fix it – but explain to me how it works. If my sisters learned when they were only children, I can learn now – and you can teach me. I need this, and I deserve this. You owe this to me.’
‘It wasn’t my fault, you know,’ she said, turning to look at me when I much preferred she looked at the road. ‘And it wasn’t really his. He had his reasons.’
‘Yes, I know. He always does. No matter what I hear about him, he always has his precious bloody reasons. Like you said, that’s between him and me. Now tell me what I can do to stop the visions.’
She sighed, and thankfully turned her attention back to driving.
‘When you contacted Gabriel last night, you used the power of your mind. You went far beyond anything I’ve seen a novice ever do, Lily. You have great natural talent – that’s probably why your visions have been so strong, so frequent. Does it sometimes happen with places as well as people?’
I recalled the long-ago incident with the mystic monks on the Mersey Ferry. And another time, when I was a bit older, on a school trip to Croxteth Hall, a vast Edwardian manor house on the outskirts of town. As we’d all piled off the coach, flicking elastic bands at each other and guzzling bottles of Sunny D, I’d seen it as it had been back in its heyday: buzzing with uniformed staff, coachmen, gardeners, maids in black dresses and frilly white caps, gamekeepers with pheasants slung over their shoulders, trailing blood as they made their way to the kitchens. The vision had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but made the trip round the Hall a lot more vivid.
‘Yes,’ I said simply. She didn’t need the details.
‘I thought so. How did you contact Gabriel, would you say? There were no magic words, no special herbs, but you did it. How?’
I thought about it. At heart, it had been about will. About focus, and using my own energy to achieve something I really wanted to do.
‘I did it by funnelling everything I had into that one aim. And by listening to what you were telling me to do.’
‘Yes. And you did it quickly, and with relative ease. I never expected you to be able to do that, Lily. That’s because of who you are, your nature. It’s the same with the visions. You can control them; you can switch them on and off, choose when to accept them. You have the power. It’s up to you to do it.’
‘What you seem to be telling me, Fionnula, is that it all comes down to trying really, really hard. Is that it? Is that your whole magical training spiel in a sentence? Because, believe me, I’ve tried really hard over the years, and it’s still happened.’
I was getting angry, and frustrated, and fidgety. The seat belt was way too tight, and the heating was on full blast, and Fionnula was talking a crock of shite. It all added up to one irritable chick.
‘No, you haven’t tried, Lily. Not really. You’ve panicked, been scared, and retreated. Chosen the path of least resistance because you didn’t know any better. Avoided touching people instead of learning to control it. Hidden from the visions instead of confronting them. But again it comes down to will – to focus. It won’t be easy to start with, but it will get better with practice. When someone touches you, you need to summon up all your resolve, all your determination, and switch it off. Put up a barrier, a wall of willpower to hold them off. Visualise it, any way you please. Like you did to reach Gabriel. I won’t be there to guide you, but I am sure you can still do it. Try now, with Carmel.’
Carmel silently stretched a hand forward between the two front seats, offering her fingers. I looked down at them, felt the familiar fear rise in my throat.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Fionnula. ‘That’s what clouds your judgement, makes the visions worse. You need to stay calm, and channel everything into it.’
I stared at Carmel’s fingers again. She was wriggling them up and down now. Hilarious.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not with her. Not with Carmel. I believe what you say, but I won’t try it with her.’
The fingers gave a sad wave, then fell back, as though disappointed. I felt Fionnula’s disapproval swell and fill the car; saw it in the tight line of her lips. Tough titty. I refused, absolutely refused, to be put in a position where I could see anything bad happen to Carmel. And in our current circumstances, the something-bad could be happening quite soon, and possibly related to me. No way, José.