“We can change this,” Danni said in her mind. “Help me.”
Her free hand felt like lead as she tried to lift it. The effort pulled her shredded muscles and made her want to scream, but somehow she managed to get her fingers around the Celtic pendant at her throat. She felt it swell in her grasp, felt it burn against her palm. And then it moved—she felt the silver strands changing, unraveling, spinning into something new.
Dáirinn clutched Danni’s other hand, and she knew the child felt it, too. They were scared—both of them—but they didn’t turn back. They didn’t push away. Dáirinn channeled Rory’s pleas into Danni’s thoughts until she felt a spark and then a flaring of life. The air around them began to tremble and quake, shaking loose stones that rattled down to the floor and plunged into the water. Her mother was screaming, but Danni and Dáirinn held on. Inside Danni’s head, pictures flashed like lightning, then everything else seemed to warble and slow to a grinding halt, as if time had simply stopped.
Danni opened her eyes and looked around. Her mother stood with her mouth open, hands frozen in midgesture. Niall knelt beside his son, tears suspended on his face. Michael’s spirit hovered motionless in the air.
Dáirinn looked down at Danni and found her staring back. She gave a small nod and then the air shifted slowly, screeching like a rusty wheel on an ancient axle. It whispered past them, gaining momentum, blowing faster and faster until it seemed to howl. The pool of blood beneath Danni began to shrink and Danni took a deep breath, her eyes clearer, her grip stronger.
Rewind
, Danni thought, amazed.
We’re rewinding time.
The sounds came in stilted blasts. Suddenly her mother was holding another Dáirinn in her arms as the child tried desperately to break free. And then her father and Rory reappeared, fighting over the Book and then Rory was moving away. Sean seeped back into his flesh, standing just a few feet away from her. She met his eyes, bundled her thoughts tight and sent them into his mind.
One chance. One chance.
In reverse, Cathán fired his gun at Danni, only now the bullet made its way back
into
the gun. Cathán swung it away and aimed once more at Niall. The bullet jerked from Michael’s body, seeming to yank him up from the ground and toss him back where he’d stood beside his father.
Danni squeezed Dáirinn’s hand once and then she let go.
Like a rubber band stretched hard, time flew at them with a snap. Rewind was over and now the seconds rushed forward. Danni was on her feet, moving even before she’d caught her balance. Cathán raised the gun to Niall once more, but Danni knocked his hand just as he fired and the shot went wild.
He whipped the pistol against her face and pain exploded everywhere. Without wasting a second, he shot her point-blank in the stomach and then swung the gun at Niall and fired again. Danni watched in slow motion as the bullet streaked unerringly at Niall Ballagh. Once more, Michael lunged for his father, but this time, the grown-up Sean made it there first. The bullet caught him square in the chest and slammed him back against the wall. His heart stopped instantly and he sank to the ground, eyes sightless.
Danni’s scream of agony came from the pit of her soul. Once again, she felt the life draining out of her. She was numb and death rushed at her like a blur and she welcomed it, for what was life without Sean? With her last gasping breath, she watched her fate unfold.
Rory was already fighting for the Book with her father, but Danni saw that Dáirinn wasn’t going to let him go this time. Even as Dáirinn grabbed from behind, Rory disappeared as he had before, but Dáirinn held on. Danni felt the child throw her thoughts out like a rope and catch him. And then she pulled. Her brother came back with a
whir
that knocked them both to the ground.
But her father and the Book of Fennore were gone for good.
Everything became hazy then. The voices around her warbled and she realized she was fading, just as Sean was. She lifted her hand and it felt heavy, but she could see right through it. Fading, like a morning mist.
There was a moment of panic. What would happen now? They’d changed history. Changed their own lives . . . But the fear waned with her existence. She closed her eyes on the alarmed voices and she gave in to the tide of destiny.
Chapter Forty-three
I
T
wasn’t dream; it wasn’t vision. It was some hybrid in between.
She looked down at her own body, bloody and battered . . . defeated. But she felt no pain. She felt no fear.
She stepped away, turning as a familiar voice called her name. She smiled as she looked into his unusual eyes—not quite green, not quite gray—and took the hand he held out to her. Without a word, she followed him out of the cavern and into the bright light that waited.
Chapter Forty-four
O
N her fifth birthday, Dáirinn MacGrath declared she would be called Danni and would answer to nothing else. When they thought of it, the people of Ballyfionúir attributed the demand to the child’s queerness. It was the way of the Ballaghs and the MacGraths, and didn’t they all know it? After Cathán MacGrath had disappeared without a trace—no doubt run off with some whore from Cork or even Limerick—the townsfolk tended to indulge the children. And who wouldn’t in their shoes?
Sure and for years tongues wagged about Cathán’s abandonment of his family. Some speculated he’d not gone off at all, but had been shot by an irate father for impregnating his daughter. Others wa gered it more likely that a jealous husband had done in the wretched man. A small minority thought he might have pulled the trigger on himself and ended his sinful ways, the cheating gobshite.
And didn’t some think a darker fate had taken Cathán MacGrath? Hadn’t they all heard rumors about what he’d been up to? Didn’t the old women talk about him when they were pissfaced on a Saturday night? They said he’d found the Book of Fennore. They said he would be cursed for all of eternity because of it.
Whatever his fate, he was missed like a famine—or not at all, as they say.
The MacGrath twins were raised by their mother and her second husband, Niall Ballagh, who brought to the union two sons from his first marriage. Lucky for the couple, Ballagh’s mother was usually available to lend a hand. Fia had given birth to a lovely daughter six months after that momentous night when her husband disappeared. The baby girl was said to be a blessing of unimagined proportions.
It was widely agreed that Danni MacGrath was able to overcome the trauma of losing her birth father, but her twin brother Rory lacked the fortitude to do the same. A serious child, he became sullen and withdrawn. As the teen years approached, his pensive ways turned brooding and then destructive. At the age of twelve, the boy was sent away for a summer to live with his Aunt Edel and her American husband. A dentist, they say. The townspeople who had suffered his vandalism and petty thievery for years were much relieved—more so when the boy refused to return home. The gossip said young Rory sent word home and occasionally there was a picture, too. He had nice teeth, the boy did, and they all decided it was for the best that he’d gone.
Niall Ballagh’s eldest son, Sean, attended school in London and became famous for his renovations of historical monuments. The youngest had not fared so well, but tragedy was nothing new to Ballyfionúir.
All in all, the townsfolk often remarked over a pint at Sulley’s Pub, they’d come out on the right of things.
Epilogue
IT had been seven years since Dáirinn MacGrath—Danni to her friends and family—had left for New York and Columbia University. She’d graduated in the top of her class and worked freelance before becoming a staff writer for the
New York Times
. It was the culmination of a lifetime of goals and dreams, and she was a good reporter—a great one, she’d heard her editor say. She always seemed to know when a story was about to break or a witness about to spill his secrets. A gift, her editor called it. A gift.
But though she loved every minute of her life, as Danni approached her twenty-fifth birthday, she acknowledged that something was missing. She began to have dreams that tormented her and chased her through the nights. Dreams of losing something, something near and dear. Something irreplaceable.
Then she’d done the story on abandoned children and her life had changed completely. Her article sparked a reform in the child protection agency and in the adoption laws which prevented so many good couples from adopting children and placed so many hopeless children in abusive homes. The work she’d done had opened her heart to the plight of the lost and abandoned children of the world.
She decided then and there that she would make a difference to as many as she could. Her Nana Colleen had told her once that a person should look in their own backyard before they thought to clean up another’s. And so Danni had come home to start here.
Ballyfionúir hadn’t changed much in the passing years, and yet coming home for the first time in so long, it seemed to Danni that the differences were profound. There was a shine to the fishing village brought on in part by the increase in tourism. There were specialty shops and pubs, and dining establishments lining the cobbled road. The once faded buildings were now painted in stunning pastels with bright colored doors. There was still nothing in the way of hotels—the overriding opinion was that tourists should find their way home before the need for sleep came around.
Her mother had written and told her that her stepbrother Sean was back in town as well. He’d turned his eye on the MacGrath ruins and intended to restore it. A noble undertaking, though she’d much prefer it if they were simply destroyed. She didn’t remember anything about the night her father had vanished, but it always seemed to her that something dire had taken place in the cavern beneath the ruins and she associated it with his desertion.
She let out a sigh, knowing Rory remembered much more, though he’d never talk about it. Rory had sworn he’d never return to Ballyfionúir and he meant it. She knew her mother missed him terribly and blamed herself, though Danni never understood why.
As she drove her rented car up to the house, she saw the workers and equipment everywhere. The grounds around the house and ruins looked to be in absolute chaos, and she frowned. She’d been dreaming of the peace and quiet of her home, not this bedlam of hammers and saws and huge cranes. It made her angry. Damn
Sean Michael Ballagh
, she thought even as her heart sped up at the idea that he might appear at any moment.
The last time she’d seen him, she’d been thirteen, he’d been twenty-two and gone to school in London for the past four years. Four years during which she’d changed from a schoolgirl to a teenager who dreamed of him coming home some day and seeing her as woman. He wasn’t her real brother, after all, and she’d never thought of him as one.
But instead of sweeping her into his arms and declaring his intentions to wait for her to reach a marriageable age, he’d brought another woman home with him—a lovely thing with black hair and blue eyes and breasts that couldn’t be real. He’d given Danni’s ponytail a tweak and tossed her a soft stuffed animal he’d brought as a gift. It was a puppy, which she secretly loved. But at that moment, it made her feel like a child being placated and dismissed with a toy. She’d been so hurt and angry that she’d locked herself in her room and hadn’t come out for the entire weekend, not even to say good-bye.
By the time he’d made it home again, she’d been off to college herself, and now twelve years had passed. Well, she was definitely a woman now.
She glanced down at her faded jeans and old sweater. She needed to shower and clean up before she said hello to him. No matter that her crush on Sean was long over, she was woman enough to want to look sophisticated and poised when she saw him—hell and gone from that gawky thirteen-year-old girl anyway.
She turned to go inside and see her parents when a small black and brown ball of fur raced at her from the direction of the construction. It was barking crazily and charging like Danni was a meaty stew bone in danger of being tossed out.
A dog?
Startled, Danni stepped back against the car as the animal came to an ungainly stop at her feet. It
was
a dog, she realized. A mongrel mixture of so many breeds that it barely resembled a canine. It had long thin legs and a stout body. No tail, but perky ears and brown eyes that now looked at her with adoration she didn’t deserve.
“Hi there,” she said, squatting down. The dog had fur like silk and wagged its entire body as she greeted it. “Is it a dog you’re trying to be?” Danni laughed as she scratched behind its ear.
A stern voice called to the little beast, and Danni looked up to see a man following the same path the dog had from the midst of the construction.
He was tall with broad shoulders and the layered muscles of a warrior, though he moved with easy grace and long, purposeful strides. He wore a T-shirt that might have been white when he’d put it on but was now covered with dirt. A denim button-down hung open over it. Faded blue jeans hugged lean hips and long legs. Not just tall. Not just broad. A big man.
He stopped in front of where she knelt with the dog and hunkered down beside them. Danni’s eyes followed the powerful line up from flat belly to muscular chest to his tanned throat, square jaw, coming to a stop at eyes not quite green, not quite gray. Eyes like the Irish Sea itself. She might not have recognized the man Sean had become if not for those unforgettable eyes.
For a moment she could only stare, and it seemed somewhere beyond her memory, beyond this moment in time, there was a history stretching out behind them both. An inexplicable past and future entwined and interwoven, binding them together. Images rushed at her . . . his arms around her, his body close and hot, his mouth on hers. But she’d never . . .
They’ d
never . . .
And yet, like a song she couldn’t forget, the thoughts played on and she knew she had . . .
they had
. And she’d been waiting her whole life to have what they’d shared again. It was crazy but it felt too real to doubt.