create guardians. The six. Us.”
“Six who carry their blood,” Bran stated.
“Plenty diluted,” Sawyer observed, “but you have to call it cool. We’ve got the blood of gods, man.”
“They used us even then?” Doyle demanded as insult—pure and hot—burned through the grief. “Sealed our fates? Determined my brother would die an agonizing death before he was really a man so I would be cursed with immortality?”
“I don’t think so.” To offset the rise of his anger, Riley spoke briskly. “I’m not claiming the gods can’t be cruel, but I also don’t believe they refine the details. You’d have had a run-in, somehow or other, with a force that turned you. Sasha might have embraced her gift all her life, but she’d still have ended up in Corfu. Me, too, even if I’d opted to write and teach rather than going for fieldwork.
“But yeah,” she said after a moment, “they used us. They gave us some of themselves, and that part of the blood may have influenced us all to come together, to stay together, to risk what we’re risking.”
“And don’t you think it’s helped us beat Nerezza?” Sasha met Riley’s eyes. “You think that, and so do I now. I’m so sorry, Doyle, and I wish I’d known or felt before you looked at the sketch. I wish there’d been a way to prepare you.”
“It’s not on you. I read the damn description, and didn’t put it together.” He could wonder now why it hadn’t struck him, but there was no going back. “I don’t like the idea that a trio of gods started my bloodline for their own purposes.”
“You can take that up with them when we find the island.” Riley shrugged. “Odds are they’re still around, being gods. And I think odds are we’re going to find the island from here, that it’s going to be off this coast, just as it was for Bran and Doyle’s mutual ancestor.”
“I can swim out and look.” Annika snuggled next to Sawyer. “Sawyer said he’d take me down tonight so I can swim. I can look, too.”
“You can, but I don’t think it’ll be that easy.”
“And it’s not time,” Sasha added. “No, not a vision, just logic. There’s no reason for the island to reveal itself until we have the last star.”
“Agreed.” Now Riley dropped into a chair, slouched, and stretched. “We probably have some time before Nerezza comes after us, so we shouldn’t waste it.”
“Training starts tomorrow, dawn,” Doyle said.
“Check. And I’ve lined up the boat and equipment. Do you know these waters, Anni?”
“Not very well, but I’ll swim, and look. For caves.”
“You got it.” Riley toasted her. “So Annika’s scouting, I’m on equipment, Bran’s already working on more magickal supplies.”
“Doyle and I are going to set up the target area,” Sawyer put in.
“And I’ll finish making dinner, try more sketching.”
“I’ll grab a bowl of that soup early,” Riley told her. “I’d rather not cut it so close to the change again. Bran, any way you can do something on one of the doors so I can get back in on my own?”
“I can, and should have thought of it. I’ll charm the door leading into the kitchen so you’ve only to step up to it.”
“Thanks. Unless anybody has more to say, or needs me, I’m going to go use the gym for a while.”
“You did hear training at dawn?”
Riley grinned at Sasha. “Entirely different. Hey, come up with me. We’ll do some lifting.”
“I’m going to lift a wooden spoon to stir the soup.”
“I would go with you.” Annika popped up. “I like the gym with the mirrors.”
“Yes, I know. Come on.”
“What will we lift?” Annika asked as she followed Riley out.
“I bet she finds a way to make pumping iron a game.” Sawyer smiled after her, started to sip some beer, caught Sasha’s glance.
“I’ve got something,” he decided. “Be back in a couple minutes to set up, Doyle.”
“I want a fresh pad.” Sasha stood, moved out of the room with him. And left Doyle and Bran alone.
“My grandmother lives,” Bran began. “She walks five miles daily, rain or shine, has a cat named Morgana, pesters my grandfather over his cigars, and enjoys a whiskey every evening. It will be a hard day for me when her time comes.”
He paused, considered. “My family comes here from time to time, and came during the time I was having this house built. My grandmother walked the bones of the house with me in the early stages. She said to me: ‘Boy, you’ve chosen well. This place has known love and grief, laughter and tears, as most have. But this place more than most. You’ll honor that even as you make it your own.’”
“She’s a seer?”
“She’s not, no. A witch, of course, but not a seer with it. She felt it, I think, felt what was here, as I felt it. Something that called to the blood. Yours calling to mine.” Bran leaned forward toward friend, toward brother. “You lost your family, Doyle, some through cruelty, some through the natural order of things. I want to say you have family still.”
“Whether I want it or not?”
Bran merely smiled. “Well now, we never can choose that, can we?”
He’d clicked with Bran, he had to admit it, quicker and easier than he’d clicked with anyone in recent, even distant memory. Something there, Doyle thought now, that had simply spoken to him.
In the blood.
“I’d stopped wanting it. Wanting family,” Doyle said. “That’s survival. For all your power, you don’t know what it is to see centuries of sunrises, to know at each dawn there’ll be no end for you, but there will for everyone who matters to you. If you let them matter.”
“I can’t know,” Bran agreed. “But I know what’s now matters, too. We’re blood, and before we knew that, we were comrades and friends. I’ve trusted you with my life, and the life of the woman I love. I would trust you again. There’s no closer bond than that.”
The bitter in the bittersweet still sat hard in his belly. “They brought me back here, the gods, the fates.”
“But not alone.”
Nodding slowly, Doyle met Bran’s dark eyes. “No, brother, not alone. So, here it started for me. It may be here we’ll finish it.”
• • •
As the day faded, Riley took a bowl of soup up to her room. She ate while doing more research. Over the years she’d been to Ireland, and this part of Ireland many times on digs. With her parents as a child on studies.
There would be caves—on land, under the sea—and ruins and stone circles. Until she’d read the journal she’d leaned toward the star being in or around Clare—but had opened to the possibility it fell in another part of Ireland.
But now she was certain Clare held the star.
The Fire Star had been in a cave under the water. Part of a rock in an underground cavern. It had called to Sasha.
The Water Star, again in the water, but this time part of the water, waiting for Annika to find the statue of the goddess and form it back into its brilliant blue.
Pattern would suggest the water again. A cave or cavern in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast. Ice, cold. That fit, too.
Would it sing or call as the other stars had? Who would hear it? Her money, for now, was on Doyle. Possibly Bran, but Doyle had the deepest roots here.
She’d be keeping an eye on him, just in case.
Annika would scout—as only a mermaid could—in the sea itself. And while she did, Riley determined she would dig in her own way, through books, the Internet, maps.
If nothing else, they could start eliminating. If Sasha had a vision or two to give them some direction, some bread crumbs, so much the better, but to Riley’s mind nothing replaced research and action based on it.
She lost herself in it, but this time—considering the race to strip down before the change—she’d set the alarm on her phone to go off ten minutes before sunset.
At its warning, she turned off her laptop, closed her books, opened the balcony doors.
No one and nothing stirred in her view. Under the best of circumstances, she much preferred to go through the change in private. Not just for modesty—though, hey, that counted—but because it was personal.
Her birthright, her gift. One she now believed had a connection to the three goddesses. Maybe she’d write a paper on it, she thought as she undressed, send it to the council. It could be someone had more information there. Information that might add to the whole.
Naked, she sat down on the floor in front of the fire as the sun sank in the west, over that cold Atlantic sea.
She felt it building, that rush, the breathless inevitability. Snaps of power, the first hints of pain. Alone, secure, she flowed into it, absorbed it, accepted.
Bones shifted, stretched. Pain, pressure, and a kind of joy.
Her spine arched as she rolled to all fours, as the dark pelt sprang up along her flesh.
She smelled the night, the fire, the smoke, her own sweat.
And with the night came the fierce triumph.
I am.
The wolf became, and inside it the woman rejoiced.
Fierce and free, she raced through the open doors, leaped over the rail into the cool night air, into the shimmering dark.
And landed on the ground, body quivering with impossible energy. Throwing her head back, she howled at the sky, then all but flew into the thick shadows of the woods.
She could run for miles, and often did in the first hour. She smelled deer, rabbit, squirrel, each scent as distinct and vivid as a photograph.
Even had she been starved, she would neither hunt nor feed. The wolf fasted.
She kept to the trees, instinctively veering away whenever she caught the scent of man or exhaust, heard the rumble of a car on a road. Though they would see only a wolf—what many would take for a large dog.
Lycans weren’t the stuff of horror movies, shambling around on furry legs with nightmare faces and crazed eyes, desperate to rip the throats out of wayward humans.
As much as she loved popular culture, most werewolf movies and books bugged the crap out of her.
Whatever the roots of that lore, they’d been dug up long ago, when lycans had civilized, when rules were set. And any who broke those sacred rules were hunted in turn and punished.
At last she slowed, the manic energy burned off by speed so she could walk and enjoy the night. She explored as she went. Perhaps the forest held secrets or clues.
An owl called, low and long, a nocturnal companion. As she looked up, she saw its eyes gleam back at her. Above the trees, the moon sailed full and white. She let go her own call, just once, honoring it, then turned to take the journey back to Bran’s house on the cliff.
She could have run and explored for hours yet, but dawn came early, and she’d need rest before it did. She thought of her family, her pack, so far away, and missed them like a chamber of her heart. Their scents, their sounds, that elemental bond.
Through the trees she saw the glimmer of lights, caught the scent of peat smoke, of roses. Everyone would be asleep by now, she thought, but they’d left lights on for her. Unnecessary, of course, but considerate.
She cast a glance back, tempted to get in one more run, watched the owl swoop over the path, its wings spread wide in the moonlight. It pulled at her, as did the night. She nearly turned, raced back, but she caught another scent.
It, too, pulled.
So she moved to the edge of the woods, looked through the shadows to where Doyle stood in his family’s graveyard.
The wind kicked just enough to billow his long coat while he stood, still as a statue in the drenching blue moonlight. His hair, dark as the night, tumbled around a face roughened by a few days’ growth of beard.
In wolf form, where everything was heightened, she felt the lust she managed to tamp down otherwise. She could imagine his hands on her, hers on him, a tangle of hot bodies giving in to the animal and taking, just taking in a frenzy until needs were met.
And imagining, those needs clawed and bit inside her.
She quivered with it, shocked, angry at the intensity, at her inability to shove it down again.
She’d run after all, she thought, but before she could move, he whirled, the sword on his back out of the sheath and into his hand with a bright shiver of metal.
His eyes met hers. Hers, keen, caught the embarrassment, then the annoyance in his before he controlled it.
“You’re lucky I didn’t have the bow. I might’ve shot a bolt.” He lowered the sword but didn’t sheathe it. “I thought you’d be inside by now. It’s past one in the morning.”
As if she had a curfew.
“Bran dealt with the door, so you can get in on your own. And as you didn’t think of it yourself, Sasha opened your bedroom door, shut the ones to your balcony.”
He wanted her to go—she could plainly see—and her preference was to give him what he wanted, as she wanted the same. But he looked unbearably lonely standing there, the sword shining in his hand, with his family buried under his feet.
She moved toward him, through the headstones, over the uneven grass.
“I’m not after company,” he began, but she simply stood, as he did, looking down at the grave. Lichen had grown on the headstone, pretty as the flowers beneath it.
Aoife Mac Cleirich
“My mother,” Doyle said when she sat beside him. “I came back and stayed until she died. My father, there beside her, died two years before her. I wasn’t here for her when she lost him.”
He fell into silence again, finally slid his sword back in its scabbard. “At least you can’t talk me blind or argue.” Doyle lifted his brows when she turned her head, stared coolly. “You do just that, at every possible opportunity. You see there she was sixty-three when she died. A good long age for the times she lived in, for a woman who’d birthed seven children. She outlived three of them, and each who left the world before she did left a hole in her heart. But she was strong, my mother. A strong woman.
“Beautiful,” he added. “You saw that yourself from Sasha’s drawing. But that wasn’t the image of her I’ve been carrying with me all this time. That one was of age and illness, of a woman ready to move on. I don’t know if it’s good or not to have the image replace that of her young and vibrant and beautiful. Does it matter at all?”
She leaned against him a little, a kind of comfort. Without thinking, he laid a hand on her head. And she let him.
“I believe there’s an after. With all I’ve seen there’s no choice but to believe it. And that’s a hell for me knowing I can’t reach it. But it’s helpful to know they have. Or sometimes it’s helpful. It’s easier not to think of it at all. But today . . .”
He broke off a moment, took a breath. “You see there, how Annika laid the flowers and the stones on every grave here. On my mother’s she put them down in the shape of a heart. Christ but Sawyer’s a lucky man. He’ll have a lifetime of sweetness. So Annika came out and gave them this respect, this sweetness, this remembrance. How could I not come and stand here, even knowing they’re not here?”
He looked down, stared at his own hand a moment, then quickly lifted it off her head, stuck it in his pocket. “We need sleep. I’m going to work your asses off come morning.” At her snort he gave her a thin smile. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”
He turned with her, walked back to the house and inside, switching off the kitchen light as they walked through.
Up the back steps, he as quiet as the wolf.
She veered off to her room, gave him one last look before nudging the door closed.
He walked to his own, wondering why he’d said so much, why he’d felt compelled to say so much. And why now he felt lighter of heart for having done so.
In his room he opened his doors to the night, lit the fire more for the pleasure of having one than for warmth. As a matter of habit, he propped his sword beside the bed, within reach, with his crossbow and a quiver of bolts beside it.
He expected no trouble that night, but believed, absolutely, in always being prepared for the unexpected.
He stripped down, switched off the lights. By moon and firelight he lay in bed, let his thoughts circle for a moment. But since they circled to the wolf, and the woman inside it, he shut them off as routinely as he had the lights. With a soldier’s skill, he willed himself to sleep.
He often dreamed. Sometimes his dreams took him back to childhood, sometimes back to wars, sometimes more pleasantly back to women. But the dreams that chased through sleep flashed and burned. The witch’s lair, his brother’s blood, the shocking pain of the curse hurled at him that for one agonizing moment had seemed to boil him from the inside out.
Battlefields littered with the dead, more than a few by his own hand. The stench of war, so much the same whatever the century, the weaponry, the field. That was blood, death, fear.
The first woman he’d allowed himself to love, a little, dying in his arms, and the child she’d died for stillborn. The second woman he’d risked, a century later, growing old and bitter with it.
Dying, the pain of it. Resurrection, the pain of it.
Nerezza, the hunt, around the world, across time. Battling with five he’d come to trust. More blood, more fear. Such courage.
The slice of sword, the death song of a bolt, the snap of bullets. The scream of creatures unearthed from a dark god’s hell.
The wolf, impossibly beautiful, with eyes like hot whiskey.
The woman, brilliant and bold, sharp and quick.
Those eyes—they compelled him to wonder.
Beside him the wolf curled, a companion in the night. Warm, soft, and bringing him an odd sort of peace. Dawn broke in bleeding reds and golds, striking the moon away with color and light. The wolf howled once.
Bittersweet.
And changed. Flesh and limbs, breasts and lips. A woman now, the tight, disciplined body naked against his. The scent of the forest on her skin, a beckoning in her eyes.
When he rolled to cover her, she laughed. When he crushed his mouth to hers, she growled, nails biting into his back. He took her breasts, firm and perfect in his hands, smooth as silk against his rough palms. Tasting of the green and the wild under his mouth.
Strong legs wrapped around him as she arched in demand. So he plundered, thrusting, thrusting, hard, fast, deep into the tight, the wet, while those eyes—wolf, woman—watched him.
He drove her, himself, next to madness. Drove mercilessly until . . .
He woke in the dark, hard as iron and alone.
He cursed, as for an instant the dream scent of her, forest wild, followed him.
The last thing he needed were sex dreams starring a woman who deviled him half the time. Until this quest was done, he needed to keep his mind, his body, his focus on the stars, on defeating Nerezza, on making sure the five who fought with him survived.
When that was done, he’d find a willing woman for a night of uncomplicated, impersonal sex. And then . . .
That was as far forward as he needed to think.
Restless, annoyed—he wouldn’t have dreamed of her if she hadn’t come to stand with him in the graveyard—he rolled out of bed.
He could smell dawn, see its approach in the slight lessening of the dark. Naked, he strode to the open doors and through for air, for the fresh and the damp of it.
The faintest sound had him whirling, braced and ready to spring back for his sword. Down the terrace, facing the sea, Sasha stood at her easel, one of Bran’s shirts over her own thin nightshirt. Bran, wearing only jeans, stood behind her while the light from their suite washed out and over them.
In it, Doyle could see the intensity on Sasha’s face as she swept charcoal over the sketchbook.
Bran glanced down, angled his head. “You’ll want some pants,” he called out. “It appears we’ll start the day with visions.”
“I’ll wake the others.”