Polly shifted uneasily, avoiding eye contact with me. Megan, however, studied me from head to toe. “Are you really a demon?” she asked. “What’s it like?”
I squatted down and whispered, “Do you like secrets?”
She grinned and nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“You must promise not to tell anyone, okay?”
She bounced on her toes and nodded again. “I promise.”
Polly’s eyes narrowed as if she were trying to warn me not to frighten the child. I winked at her and her eyes flew open wide.
I leaned closer to Megan. “I’m not really a demon,” I whispered. “I’m just a regular person like you.”
She laughed.
“But that’s our secret, right?”
She nodded. “I’m hungry,” she said.
Polly gripped her shoulder. “Never complain. It doesn’t make things better.”
“Come along, Polly,” Edmond shouted from down the path. Anna was making her way toward us.
Polly patted Megan on the head. “Be a good girl.” Then she walked away to join her husband, leaving the little girl behind.
Polly was Katie McAlister’s sister and only living relative, so it stood to reason that Megan had fallen under her care. Sadly, the Byrnes were also the least able on Dòchas to sustain another mouth to feed. Most certainly, Edmond had asked Anna to take his second charge on along with the first.
Anna crouched down in front of Megan. “Do you like pancakes with chocolate chips, Megan?”
The little girl tilted her head to the side. “I like cake and I like chocolate, so I’m sure I do.”
“Do you know who Deirdre is?”
Megan nodded.
“Well, her room has two beds in it and she would love to have a friend come stay with her at the mansion. Would you like that?”
Megan pointed at me. “Can he come stay too?”
Anna met my eyes, and the world stopped. “I certainly hope he will.”
* * *
Muireann retrieved Liam’s shirt from the beach where she’d abandoned it. With humans’ strange attitudes toward their skin, she thought it best she be prepared when she shed her pelt this time.
She’d seen Miss Ronan come and go from a cave under the house. Perhaps she could find Liam that way and tell him what he needed to do to protect himself and his female.
He had disappeared into the large dwelling with his female and a small, red-haired human earlier in the day, and she was certain he was still there. The trick would trick wbe finding him without Brigid Ronan discovering her.
* * *
Anna and I watched from the other side of the kitchen as Megan giggled and Deirdre formed a new shape from chocolate chips on the table. “This one is a square. Can you make one too?” Megan nodded and emulated Deirdre’s square, periodically popping chocolate chips in her mouth.
“I’ve never seen a kid eat so much,” Anna remarked, leaning into me. “She must have polished off eight pancakes.”
I shifted on the stool and wrapped my arm around her. “She probably hadn’t eaten since her mother died.”
Anna shuddered. “Well, that’s never going to happen again.”
“You’re a good person.” I kissed her neck.
Miss Ronan dropped a pan in the sink with a bang and turned on the faucet full force.
Anna turned in my arms so that she faced me. “I hate to break this to you, but I don’t think Miss Ronan likes you,” she whispered.
I gasped. “I had no idea! I’m completely crushed.”
She wiggled closer, leaving me one step short of insane. “But I like you.” She put her mouth to my ear. “A lot.” She nipped my earlobe.
Miss Ronan cleared her throat and dropped a rinsed pan on the stainless steel countertop.
Anna giggled. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Before she breaks something.”
That suited me fine. The most likely thing to break was my sanity. Anna was making me crazy. She placed her slender hand in mine and pulled me from the kitchen without a word to Miss Ronan.
The midday sun streamed in through the stained glass, giving her bedroom a dreamlike quality. Honestly, even without the colored shafts of light, I felt as though I were in a dream.
“I missed you,” she said, dropping my hand.
“And I you.”
“No.” She pulled the bottom of her shirt nervously. “I mean . . .” She took a deep breath. “Liam, it was weird. It was like I couldn’t breathe or think. Like I was a zombie or something.”
I sat on the edge of the chaise lounge and waited for her to formulate her thoughts into the words I had been searching for myself.
She paced from her suitcase by the bed to the door and back as she spoke. “We have something really strange and powerful going on here, you know? My feelings for you are so intense, it’s overwhelming. It’s like this crazy island of yours. I can’t control it. And it scares me.”
I stood. “Maybe we should stop trying to control it. Perhaps we should just give in to it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, trembling.
“I realized something while you were gone.” I moved several steps closer. “It happened when I was certain you had never loved me and had left me forever.”
She opened her mouth to protest but said nothing when I held my finger up.
“I know that never happened, but at the time, I thought that it had.”
She nodded and sat on the edge of her bed.
I sat next to her. “What I realized was that I could never love anyoner love a but you. Ever. My heart is yours forever, Anna. I don’t have a choice in it. You are the other part of me.”
A tear rolled down her cheek and I wiped it away with my thumb.
“And I owe you an apology,” I continued. “I doubted you, and that was unfair. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry that you were hurt. Miss Ronan misunderstood the situation.”
She brushed her hair behind her shoulder and met my eyes. “What was the situation?”
I shifted to where I sat higher on the bed. “The girl she told you about. She has unusual behavior. It wasn’t what it looked like.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I figured Ronan had just made it up to piss me off. Then Deirdre told me about it and I believed her. After I cooled off, I decided Ronan forced Deirdre to tell me a story to drive us apart. So, there really was a girl?”
My stomach churned. “Yes and no.”
Her other eyebrow shot up.
“She’s not really a girl. She’s a Selkie.”
For a moment, I thought she was angry, but her brow relaxed and she took a deep breath, shaking her head. “Honestly, Liam. I’d like to think you’re delusional or screwing with me, but I think you’re serious.”
“Francine can clear a lot of this up for you. She had much more interaction with her than I did.”
“Not according to Miss Ronan.”
“Ronan is the one who planted the fake letter from you to Nicky saying you were bored with slumming and coming back to him.”
Anna covered her mouth. “Oh, God.”
“We’ve both been played, Anna. And honestly, I’m convinced we’re part of some larger scheme.”
“It’s just Ronan being a bitch,” she said, pushing to her feet.
“No. It’s more than that. The Selkie couldn’t tell me who sent her or why, but she said her objective was to help us stay together. Why would an Otherworlder be compelled to protect us?”
She paced the room again. “Wow. I feel like I’ve ODed on eggnog again.”
“I know it’s hard to grasp, but it makes sense.”
Throwing her arms over her head, she made a frustrated groan. “None of this makes sense. I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.”
“Here’s what I know.” I stepped in front of her and pulled her to me. “The only thing I know is that I love you and want to spend every moment with you if you’ll allow it.”
“That’s why I’m here. We
’re getting out of here together with Deirdre and Megan as soon as the big chopper is available to fly us away from this awful place. We’re going to be together away from demons and funeral pyres and creepy blue guys and screaming invisible women and starving children and all the other twisted, screwed-up things on this island. Just you and me.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “I love you, Liam MacGregor, and all of the creepies in the world can’t change that.”
A scratching sound from behind me sent a tremor of terror down my spine. “Shhh. Listen,” I said. “Did you hear that?”
Anna held her breath.
There it was again: a light tapping sounded from the other side of the secret panel.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, backing away toward the door.
I crossed to the panel and put my ear against it. “Hello?” I said.
“Liam?” was the response from the other side.
I shoved the dresser I had placed in front of the panel aside and pulled the picture from the peg next to it. I pushed up on the peg and the panel clicked. I ran my fingers in the opening and released the second catch. “Anna, I’d like you to meet the Selkie I told you about.” I swung the panel open to find Muireann drenching wet and shivering in my T-shirt.
“Hi, Liam’s female!” Muireann entered the room without invitation. Anna took a step back. “I’m glad you returned.”
Anna stood still, jaw open.
“How did you know about the passage, Muireann?” I asked.
“I went in the cave Brigid Ronan uses to talk to the Na Fir Ghorm. I used my human ears to hear you. Oooh. This is so pretty. It’s like a sunrise, a sunset, and a rainbow all in one place.” She ran her fingers over the stained glass.
“She’s in your shirt,” Anna muttered, still stunned.
“Yes. Liam gets all nervous when I only wear my human skin. He covers me up,” Muireann said, wandering the room. “He made me wear this last time, so I wore it again.”
I needed to get her to focus. “Muireann, why are you here?”
“Oh, well. I came to warn you and give you a trick.”
Anna slumped down onto the bed, eyes still trained on Muireann.
“Warn us against what?” I asked.
“Well, I can’t really say because I’m not allowed, but you need to be really careful.” She picked up a vase from the table at the end of the chaise lounge and held it to the colored light coming through the stained-glass window. “You are only in danger for a few weeks more, so we have devised a trick to undo it.”
I took a step closer to her. “Undo what?”
She clamped her hand over her mouth.
“Okay, what trick, then?” I asked.
Almost too quickly, she trotted over to Anna, who stiffened. “Do you love him? I mean really love him like I do?”
Anna shot startled looks from me to Muireann. “I love him more than you do.”
“Great. And I know he loves you because he refused to mate with me.”
Anna jumped to her feet. “He . . . what?”
“So, here’s what you need to do. You need to become bonded for a moon cycle and a day so that they will leave you alone so they don’t hurt or kill you and you can be together.”
I took her by the shoulder. “Who?”
She covered her mouth with her hands. “Oops.”
I turned her shoulder loose. “What do you mean by bonded?”
“I really like lamps.” She skipped to the nightstand and switched the lamp on and off and on and off. “I got to play with one when I spent the night here.”
Her attention was so scattered it was hard to keep up. “Muireann, please focus. What do you mean by bonded?”
She moved away from the lamp and the lampran her fingers over the bedcover. “Well, it’s like your ancestors’ handfasting ceremony but better because it works soul deep and into the Otherworld too. You can choose the amount of time you wish to be bonded from a moon cycle to eternity. We’re not really supposed to share it with humans, but this is a special case and I got it okayed from higher up.”
“Who is higher up?”
“Well, the Bean Sidhes said it was okay.” She covered her mouth. “Oops.”
“You can talk to Bean Sidhes?” Anna said.
Hands still over her mouth, Muireann nodded. She pulled her hands from her mouth and studied them, wiggling her fingers, smiling. “I need to go now before I make more mistakes. If you want to do this, meet us on the beach outside the tunnel just after sunset. Bye!”
After she slipped out the panel and pushed it shut, I slid the dresser back in place.
“This is worse than eggnog-induced delirium.” Anna shook her head. “Wow, that was weird.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes. This was not simply Muireann being whimsical. Something wanted to hurt or kill us to keep us apart and she was trying to help us.
Anna chuckled. I opened my eyes to find her still staring at the hidden panel. “You refused to ‘mate’ with her?”
I nodded.
She laughed. “Even when you thought I was home screwing around with Nicky?”
Her laughter unnerved me slightly. “There is no one else for me. Only you.”
“She’s very pretty. Striking, really. If she weren’t some freaky paranormal creature, she could be a model.”
“That’s irrelevant. I love you.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
“The bonding thing she talked about.” She ran her hands down my back and up again, causing my breath to catch.
“Anna, it’s serious. It’s mar
riage, only into the next world as well.”
She dropped her hands. “So, you don’t really love me that much?”
“My God. It’s . . . Yes. Yes, I do. It’s you I’m thinking of.”
She plopped down on the bed. “I sat through my brother’s wedding, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to be with you. How superficial everything seemed compared to my feelings for you.” She stared right into my eyes. “Let’s do it.”
I couldn’t believe she would even consider this. “There’s no backing out once it’s done until the specified time is up.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you anticipate remorse?”
“Yes. You could have anyone.”
“But I want you.” She stood and moved directly in front of me—so close that if she had leaned forward, we would have touched. “Do you think you’re going to want to back out?”
“No.”
“Then you think for you, and I’ll think for me.” She ran her hands under my shirt and up the skin of my back. “Right now, I don’t want to think at all. I just want you to kiss me.”
34
If you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires.
—Edgar Allan Poe,
from a letter to Helen Whitman, 1848
Muireann waited at the water’s edge, never taking her eyes off the cave entrance. She kept still and low, only the top of her head, eyes, and nose above water. She didn’t want to be seen by the Na Fir Ghorm or even her pod mates, for that matter.
In the faint light from the setting sun, she could see Liam’s shirt draped over the rock where she had left it. An involuntary shudder rolled through her. She dreaded shedding her pelt and being cold again. She never felt cold in her seal form, but the water made her human form numb and achy.
Maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe she had said something wrong when she spoke with them. The human world was confusing. They spoke in riddles and hid themselves. Her stomach turned over. Maybe his female didn’t love him enough to commit her soul to his.
Finally, movement came from within the cave. They had decided to go through with it after all.
Muireann’s heart stopped when Brigid Ronan emerged from the opening.
* * *
I locked Anna’s door after returning with two more c
andles from her uncle’s room. Miss Ronan hadn’t interrupted us, which was surprising since the sun had set and I was forbidden to be in the house after dark.
“We’re in a hurry, Anna,” I said. “We let time get away. It’s already past sundown, which is when we were supposed to meet Muireann.”
Anna appeared in the doorway of her bathroom, and I was spellbound. She wore the silver dress from Bealtaine and her hair was piled up on her head, exposing her lovely neck. “Muireann will wait.” She smiled. “I have something for you. I got it from my uncle’s closet while you showered.”
She reached into her closet and produced a black suit jacket. “There’s also a shirt, pants, and a tie.” After pitching the jacket onto her bed, she produced the other items and laid them out beside it. “We should dress up, don’t you think?”
We would only be bound for a month and a day, but I still wasn’t certain Anna understood the seriousness of it. “You’re sure about this.”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” She unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off, replacing it with the white, stiff shirt from her bed. Deftly, she buttoned it all the way down in the time it would have taken me to manage one button. “I’ll leave you to the rest,” she said, disappearing back into her bathroom.
I pulled on the pants and jacket. The pants were a bit loose, but they stayed up. The tie was another issue entirely. I’d seen plenty of them in the newspapers and tabloids, but I’d never laid eyes on one myself. After draping it around my neck, I tapped on the door frame of her open bathroom door. She put the top on her lipstick and smiled at me in the mirror. “You look so handsome. Like James Bond.”
I wondered if we lived to be old, would she always have this effect on me? Would I forever be held breathless when she smiled? Yes. Undoubtedly I would, I decided, as she tied the necktieÀd the ne while standing so close I could feel the heat radiating from her skin warm my own. Part of me felt unworthy of her, yet I also knew that no one would ever love and treasure her the way I did. Perhaps that part of me outweighed my deficits adequately enough to make me deserving. I would certainly endeavor to spend the rest of my days proving not only to myself, but to her, that I was worthy of her.