Authors: Jennifer Fallon
‘Amergin was like a father to you, too,’ Sorcha pointed out in a sour whisper. ‘That didn’t stop him betraying you in our realm. I’m quite certain it won’t stop him betraying us in this one, either.’
Darragh had no answer to that, other than his faith in his brother’s memories that the
Comhroinn
— the magical mind sharing of the Druids in his reality — had given him. He had to believe Rónán’s high opinion of Patrick was deserved because, really, Sorcha had a point. Right until Amergin confessed his betrayal on his deathbed, Darragh would have sworn the Druid was the most trusted man in the entire universe.
Was fate so cruel? Are we so naïve and unlucky that we could be betrayed twice by the same man in two different realities?
He cried out suddenly as a sharp pain slashed across his face.
‘Be quiet!’ Sorcha hissed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered back, reaching up to touch his cheek gingerly. His fingers came away sticky with blood. ‘Something cut me. On the face.’
‘How …?’ Sorcha began, and then Darragh felt her shrug in the darkness. ‘Rónán is alive then.’
‘So it would seem,’ Darragh agreed. He wasn’t sure if Rónán was safe, however. For him to manifest a wound inflicted on his brother in another reality, the wound had to have been caused by a weapon forged of
airgead sídhe
. Faerie silver.
It did not bode well that Rónán had been gone only a few hours and was already wounded with a magical weapon. Where was he? Had he slipped while handling his own weapon or was he under attack? Darragh had no way of knowing, and only one
small consolation. The psychic link between them only worked on magical injuries. At least, wherever he was, Rónán was not suffering the indignity of a sprained ankle in a realm devoid of magic.
They rocked forward as the car came to a stop. His heart in his throat, Darragh realised they were about to find out what Patrick Boyle planned to do with them. He heard faint voices, then footsteps. The car started again. A few moments later they stopped and the engine died. More footsteps, the trunk lid lifted and daylight flooded in, temporarily blinding both of them.
‘You okay in there?’
Darragh squinted in the painful light, noting — with a great deal of relief — that Patrick seemed to be alone.
‘We’re fine,’ he said, a little warily. ‘Are we somewhere safe?’
‘Temporarily,’ the man who reminded him so uncomfortably of Amergin said, glancing around. ‘I just dropped Kiva off at the RTE studios in Donnybrook. Your mam has a TV interview scheduled this morning. No thanks to you. She’s calling it damage control.’ The man glanced around again and then stepped back and beckoned them out.
‘Where are we?’ Sorcha asked, frowning at the unfamiliar surroundings.
‘St Vinnie’s Hospital car park. Should be safe enough for the moment.’
Cautiously Sorcha and Darragh climbed stiffly out of the car and looked around. It was well past daybreak now. They were in a multi-level car park between rows and rows of abandoned vehicles, although none seemed as large or stately as the Bentley. The air smelled of petrol fumes and stale urine but there were no people around that Darragh could see. His ankle was throbbing, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to put much weight on it, but he wasn’t going to confess that to Patrick. The chauffeur hadn’t betrayed him yet, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t.
‘Have you got any cash on you?’ Patrick asked.
Darragh shook his head. He hadn’t planned to spend more than a few hours in this reality. What need for coin of the realm?
‘You’d be a fool to use a credit card they can trace.’
He nodded in agreement, not sure what Patrick meant about cards being traced. He was quite certain, if he found the time to trawl through his twin brother’s memories — acquired in the
Comhroinn
— that Patrick’s warning would make sense.
‘Here then,’ Patrick said, pulling out his wallet. He thrust a number of paper notes at Darragh. ‘That should be enough to get you home. If you catch the DART at Elm Park you’ll be home in a few minutes.’
The DART? He means the train. By
Danú
, he expects us to travel by public transport?
‘You’d better not let anybody see you,’ the chauffeur added, frowning. ‘You know where old Jack keeps his spare key in the glasshouse, don’t you?’
Still coming to grips with the notion of navigating his way through the mass-transit system of this realm, Darragh thought about it for a moment and realised one of Rónán’s clear memories included the location of the next-door neighbour’s spare key.
‘Take a cab from Blackrock Station,’ Patrick ordered. ‘Have it drop you at Jack’s place. Let yourselves inside and then lie low until I get there.’
‘What if Jack is home?’ Sorcha asked.
‘It’s Friday, so he should be at his gardening club meeting until after lunch,’ Darragh said. He realised he knew a lot about the old man who lived next door to Rónán. Darragh was relieved Patrick was sending them to Jack.
Jack had already helped them solve the problem of what to do with the man they’d kidnapped yesterday. It was fair to assume he might help them again.
‘Don’t worry, Patrick. We’ll be fine,’ Darragh said.
The chauffeur studied Sorcha for a long moment, making no attempt to hide his suspicion about who she might be and what she was doing with the boy he thought was Ren. ‘You planning on introducing your friend anytime?’
‘This is Sorcha,’ Darragh said, not sure how he was going to explain her presence without telling Patrick much more than he had time for now.
‘What have you done with my Hayley?’ Patrick asked her.
Sorcha apparently couldn’t think of any better response than the bald truth. ‘Nothing. I don’t know where she is.’
Patrick stared long and hard at both of them and then turned to Darragh. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do when I get home, Rennie, me lad. Make no mistake.’
‘He’s not —’ Sorcha began, but Darragh grabbed her arm to silence her.
‘Thank you, Patrick. We are indebted to you. And I promise,’ he added truthfully, ‘Hayley is safe and I will explain everything when we have more time. Although I’m not sure you’ll believe me.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Patrick replied, not looking at all happy with either of them. ‘I have to be back to pick Kiva up in twenty minutes so I’ll see you later. By then you’d better have a good explanation for what’s been going on these past few weeks and what’s happened to my Hayley, Ren Kavanaugh, or I’ll be ringing the Gardaí and handing you over to them myself.’
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Darragh promised.
‘Then head to Jack’s place,’ Patrick urged, as the sound of another car approaching reached them. ‘Keep that hood pulled up and don’t let anyone see your face.’
Sorcha wanted to add something, but Darragh never gave her the chance. Patrick was letting them go, and they needed to take the opportunity.
At least Jack knew the truth about them, which would make things a little easier. The ability to cross through the rifts was lost to this realm and explaining it was not only tedious, it would make him sound like a lunatic. Better to stick with those who knew the truth and save himself the trouble of telling the story over and over to people who wouldn’t believe a word he was telling them.
Leaning on Sorcha for support, and gritting his teeth against the pain, Darragh limped toward the exit sign and the ramp that led down to the street. He kept hold of Sorcha until they were out of sight of the Bentley. When he let her go, he pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt. By the time they reached the car park entrance he’d figured out that if he stayed on the ball of his foot and avoided putting any weight on his ankle, he could walk without help. He would pay for it in a couple of hours, he suspected, not looking forward to the pain. He could already feel the skin pulling as the swelling tightened about his joint. He would need to do something about his ankle when they reached Jack’s place. Rónán’s memories included a medicine called codeine which would help relieve the pain.
In the reality where he belonged, a simple thought would have cured Darragh’s injury, but here, where there was no magic, ice and a hefty dose of codeine — according to Ren’s memories — was the next best thing for a sprain.
Darragh and Sorcha crossed over the network of narrow streets of the hospital campus onto a road filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic. As he watched Darragh realised, with a sinking heart, how little he really knew about this reality. He understood what he was looking at, knew where he was and how to get home from here on his own, but his brother’s most recent memory of this place had only put him here late at night. In the rain.
After Hayley was hit by the car that caused her blindness.
The memories of that night — disconcertingly — included Trása kissing Rónán, which Darragh wasn’t expecting. He
had to push away a sudden surge of jealousy along with the unwanted — and unhelpful — memory.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sorcha asked.
‘Nothing. Are you all right?’ Sorcha had stopped by his side and was bent over, gasping heavily, as if she were having trouble breathing. He had never seen her like that before.
The warrior grimaced and straightened with a visible effort. ‘It’s the air in this realm, I think. It’s making me nauseous. Aren’t you finding it hard to breathe with all these fumes?’
‘It’ll be better once we get to Jack’s place,’ Darragh told her, trying to convince himself as much as Sorcha. He had no way of knowing if that was the case, but he couldn’t afford to despair. And she was right. The air — especially near the roads — stank like a tar pit.
‘I hope it does,’ Sorcha grumbled. ‘I don’t like this place, Darragh, and I don’t want to stay here. You have to find us a way home.’
‘I don’t like it here either,’ Darragh agreed. ‘So let’s find the train station and be gone from here.’
‘What’s a train station?’ Sorcha asked.
Darragh studied her for a moment and then sighed. With Sorcha for company, it was going to be an interesting ride. Wherever Rónán was, Darragh had to believe his brother would get him home again. Whatever it took.
If not, they were both lost. Forever.
A couple of the samurai had loosed arrows at Trása as she escaped, but she’d had the presence of mind, even in owl form, to swoop and dive erratically toward the trees. A few moments after she took off she was lost in the darkness of the forest, leaving the samurai making hand signs to ward off evil. Ren could hear her calling out to him, even after she vanished from sight, perhaps to let him know she was there.
Maybe she was trying to comfort him … and assure him rescue was at hand?
Or was she so completely avian when she changed shape that she forgot who Trása was and who she was supposed to be? Ren figured there must be some residual understanding when someone changed into an animal. How else would a shapeshifter remember to return to their normal form?
‘
Bakamono!
’
A deathly silence fell over the compound at the woman’s angry shout. Even the mastiff returned to heel, looking disappointed he’d not been able to catch the owl. Ren gave up wondering about shapeshifters and decided to concentrate on his more immediate problem — keeping his own head attached at the neck. He had to get out of here alive and then find a way back to his own reality to rescue Darragh and Sorcha. He needed
to find Hayley. He needed to save her and set things to rights in his reality — and in all the other realities he’d managed to screw up lately with his blind optimism and ignorance.
‘Idiots! You let the
Youkai
get away!’ The woman turned and pointed at Ren. ‘And look! There the other one stands, free as a bird, mocking you!’
By the time Ren registered that he was ‘the other one’ the rest of the samurai were on him. Ren’s face was pushed into the chilly, damp, sandy ground, his arms wrenched behind his back and held there. He forced his head up a little to look at the woman, wondering if she was about to order his death, too.
‘Where are the rest of your filthy kind?’ she demanded, shuffling over to him in tiny steps forced on her by the tightness of her kimono.
‘What … kind?’ he asked, spitting out grit and sand so he could speak. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘She means the rest of the stinking
Youkai
,’ someone above him explained with a helpful kick to his solar plexus.
‘I’m not
Youkai
,’ he grunted, his eyes watering with pain. He hoped his Japanese was close enough to theirs to make him understood. ‘I’m like you. I’m human.
Ningen.
’
‘You are
Youkai
,’ the woman insisted, looking down at him with contempt. ‘I can smell your stench from here.’
‘Chishihero-
sama
! His hand! Look at his hand!’
Behind his back, someone had spotted Ren’s tattooed hand. His left arm was unceremoniously wrenched around so Chishihero could study the triskalion branded into her prisoner’s palm. She was silent for a moment and then ordered the men to make him kneel before her.
They dragged Ren to his knees and forced him to lower his eyes, which placed his face about the height of the woman’s elaborate sash.
‘The mark on your hand,’ Chishihero said, in a Japanese dialect close enough to the language he spoke for him to understand it. The additional memories he’d acquired from his brother filled in more gaps, to the point where he was likely to be fluent himself, after hearing these people speak for a little longer.
‘The symbol is magical. What does it mean?’
‘
Wakarimasen
,’ Ren said.
I don’t know
.
‘You are lying.’
Ren couldn’t tell if Chishihero knew that because of the truth spell — or if she was guessing. Either way, he was in trouble.
‘I don’t know what it means,’ he insisted. ‘It’s been there all my life.’ That much, at least, was true. The truth spell
was
still in effect because his last statement made her hesitate.
‘You are dangerous, I think,’ she said eventually.