Their only acknowledgment was an increase in brightness.
The moon had reached its high point and the air was almost still. Muireann scanned the water. They should have emerged by now.
Then, one at a time, heads popped through the water’s surface, only feet away from the ledge. “Why have you interrupted us?” the leader asked. He tipped his face up toward the Bean Sidhes. “Ah, I see your allies are not hiding and spying this time.”
Muireann took a deep breath, gathering her courage. “I’ve gathered you here to make one final plea for resolution. The Bean Sidhes are willing to let the wager go, dropping it entirely, in an effort to spare the humans any more hardship.”
“You must know something we don’t. You must be aware the humans are too weak to prevail, so you are trying to help your friends out by mediating and begging a truce.” He put his clawed, webbed hands on the ledge and pulled slightly out of the water. “We will not back down.”
“Why? They have proven themselves worthy. They have endured and passed every test. Leave them alone,” Muireann pleaded.
The leader lƀowered himself back into the water, smiling. “You are in love with the human male.” He laughed. “It just gets better and better! Now when we break him completely, we will be breaking you as well, you meddlesome, worthless creature.”
“They are bonded,” one of the Bean Sidhes shrieked.
The Na Fir Ghorm bobbing at the surface exchanged glances. The leader stared up at the Bean Sidhes. His expression transformed from surprise to rage. “How dare you!”
This was why Muireann had asked the Bean Sidhes to let her do the talking. She had hoped to not let the Na Fir Ghorm know about the bonding unless it was absolutely necessary. Since the female had returned and the couple was reunited, she had hoped the Na Fir Ghorm would see the strength of their love and simply allow the wager to be dropped. The bonding was the last resort. The secret weapon.
“They are ineligible,” he shouted.
Muireann moved closer to the ledge. “No, with his lineage, they qualified.”
“How came they to be bonded? Who witnessed it?” he asked.
One of the Bean Sidhes materialized from a cloud in her female form. “We witnessed it.”
He slapped his hand on the surface of the water. “Who officiated? If it was Brigid Ronan, I’ll see to it she dies a miserable human death.”
Another Bean Sidhe joined in form with the first. “Who officiated is of no matter. What matters is that they are bonded for all time. Whatever happens, they cannot be separated.”
“You broke the rules of the wager by interfering in this manner. We claim victory.”
“We interfered no more than you did with the fake letter and the Selkie going ashore. You also have not informed us of each test as you initiated it. Since they are bonded, the wager is no longer valid.”
The leader grinned and Muireann shuddered. “The test was of human love, not the inclination of the immortal soul. Despite this little setback, their human love can still fail. We intend to make that happen.”
“Please let them live in peace,” Muireann pleaded.
“With the added pleasure of watching the Selkie suffer along with them.”
“What do you intend?” a Bean Sidhe asked.
“Well, they overcame obstacles already in place—differences in lifestyle and interests as well as the disapproval of her family. Then they withstood more difficult tests of distance, jealousy, and infidelity.” He shrugged. “We’ve no choice but to move on to physical trials.”
Muireann’s heart stopped when she considered th
e horrible range of possibilities.
“What manner of trial?”
A grin spread across his face. “Sickness. The moment one becomes weakened and a burden rather than a pleasure to the other, the human love will snap as easily as a fishing line.”
“No!” Muireann hadn’t intended to blurt it out, but the thought of her Liam suffering illness was too much. “Please don’t do this.”
The leader laughed. “You are soft, Selkie. Your love for this human male is amusing.”
She trembled.
“Very well then. We shall spare him.”
She almost fainted from relief.
size="-1">“We’ll strike the girl instead.”
This was almost worse. Liam would rather be afflicted himself than watch his female suffer.
“Let this go,” a Bean Sidhe cried. “This is not a fair wager. Torturing them is not a test of love. It is wrong and outside the rules of the Otherworld.”
“Fair? Did you say it’s not fair?” he shouted. “There is a human saying that applies: ‘All is fair in love and war.’” He turned to look at his clan and then thrust a fist into the air. “This is war!”
36
The wind came out of the cloud by night
Chilling . . . my Annabel Lee.
—Edgar Allan Poe,
from “Annabel Lee,” 1849
The sea was eerily placid and the air unseasonably still. The morning sun, as if to make up for this ominous condition, threw golden ribbons across the water, creating brilliant sparkles that reflected off Anna’s skin.
She had surprised me with a picnic breakfast on a large flat boulder near the end of the jetty. She lay on her back on the checkered blanket, eyes closed, listening as the waves gently caressed the rocks around us.
I would never tire of looking at her. Lying on my side, I skimmed my fingers down her arm. She smiled. No one had ever been as happy as I was at that moment.
A boat horn sounded to the north. It would certainly be the supply boat we had been expecting for days. I sat up. “I need to go help Francine.”
Anna rolled to her side and draped her arm over my lap. “No, you don’t.”
“Okay, I’ll rephrase it. I should go help Francine.”
She opened her eyes, which were as clear and blue as the sea surrounding us, and my heart stuttered. No love had ever been greater than ours. I was certain of it.
“How will I manage?” she teased, running her hand under my shirt.
I grinned. “With great fortitude and conviction.” Which is what it would take to force me to leave her at this moment. The boat horn blew again, announcing its arrival in the harbor. “I’ll come back as soon as it’s been unloaded and reloaded.” I removed her hand from under my shirt and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Hold that thought.”
She grumbled and rolled again to her back, frowning.
Reluctantly, I stood. “Do you want me to help you carry things back to the house?”
“No, it’s just a basket and a blanket.” She opened her eyes. “Unless having you help me would keep you from going to work . . .” She winked.
The thought of leaving her was painful, but actually walking away was worse. I looked back when I made it to the base of the jetty. Lying there in the sun with her hair fanned out on the blanket, she was as beautiful as any angel. The emptiness and sorrow I felt at parting wasn’t due to any premonition or sense of dread; it was simply feeling as though I was missing part of myself—a critical part. Perhaps this was the result of the bonding. Maybe it was simply love in its purest form.
* * *
Muireann spotted Liam as he entered the harbor. He didn’t stay long in Francine’s store before he came out to where a boat had moored to the dock. For a while, he helped two men unload boxes and crates from the deck, then reloaded it with items as Francine marked on a piece of paper.
She needed to warn him of the Na Fir Ghorm’s plan but didn’t really know what to warn against. How did a human become ill? She would shed her pelt and tell him all she knew as soon as the boat left, she decided.
Thunder cracked from the northeast. Strange, she thought, since the weather was sunny and clear.
The men from the boat studied the sky. “Weird,” one said. “There are no thunderclouds and no storms predicted.”
“Let’s load up quick,” the other said. “Better get movi
ng in case something churned up unexpectedly.”
Muireann was pleased. She wanted them to go away as soon as possible so that she could talk to Liam. She slipped from behind the boat around the bow to get a better look at him. He paused and stared at her. He let the device on wheels he was pushing rest against his waist. “Is that you, Muireann?”
She nodded and he smiled. If only he could understand her in her seal form, this would be so much easier. Despite the fact that she swam in agitated circles, he continued to smile, then resumed pushing the item on wheels to the boat. She had to be sure he didn’t go back into the store after the boat left. She didn’t want to have to go up on land for fear the Na Fir Ghorm were watching.
After way too much time and many more trips, Francine wrote on a piece of paper the first man handed her and he thanked her. Thunder cracked again, and from the direction of the large dwelling, black clouds hung low in the sky.
The boat pulled away, and as soon as Muireann was certain the men on board wouldn’t see her, she moved to the stairs and stripped her pelt below her shoulders. “Liam!” she cried just before he entered the back of the store. “Liam!”
Francine grabbed his shirt. “She’s trouble, I tell you.”
He removed her hand. “No. She’s helping me. Something’s wrong.”
A crack of thunder split the sky and Liam flinched, then ran to where Muireann clung to the stairs, only half transformed.
As he kneeled down, the black clouds expanded and blocked the sun, causing it to appear as though it was dusk.
“I’m here to warn you,” she said. “You need to protect your female. They intend to cause her harm.”
Lightning shot through the sky, making everything stark white before it fell back into dusky darkness.
“Who?” he yelled over the rumbling thunder.
She had nothing to hide any longer. “The Na Fir Ghorm. They made a wager with the Bean Sidhes. You and your mate are the objects of the wager. They’ll hurt her, Liam. They’ll kill her.”
“Dear God.” He ran his hand through his hair. “What else do you know?”
The Bean Sidhes’ shrieks drowned out the cracks of thunder. “Go now!” one screamed. “This is our fault!” cried another. They swirled around him in a tight circle screaming warnings and laments.
Liam shot to his feet. “What is it, Muireann? What are they saying?”
She could hardly see him through her tears. “They say you must go to her now and they blame themselves. I’m so sorry, Liam.”
The tortured look on his face would haunt her, she knew, until her last living breath.
* * *
I’d never run so fast in my life. What had been a sunny day transformed into inky night, broken by terrifying flashes of lightning and deafening thunder. As I neared Taibhreamh, stinging sleet showered down, making the path slick with ice and almost impossible to traverse. The air had become so cold, my teeth chattered. This was no ordinary storm. It was Otherworldly.
Near blackness had enveloped our tiny island, and the precipitation reduced my visibility to almost nothing. I prayed that Anna was safely in the mansion, tucked in her warm bed, watching a movie on her iPad. Something deep inside me knew this was remote. Far down in my soul, I felt her distress. I tripped on something in the path, tangling my foot in it. I reached down and grabbed the ice-coated picnic blanket that must have blown up here in the gale-force wind. Anna.
“Where is she?” I shouted at no one. “Help me!” I screamed to the darkness.
The trail to the jetty was off to the left, but in the darkness and punishing sleet, I couldn’t see it. I crawled on my knees, feeling for it with numb, cold fingers.
Lightning crackled in webs through the sky, and the jetty became visible. All around it, a dozen or so creatures that appeared to be human-like twirled in the waves with their arms raised to the sky. Anna was nowhere in sight. “Anna!” I screamed. It had to be the Na Fir Ghorm. Only this time, it appeared they had claimed her. “No!” Again, lightning flashed, illuminating the jetty. I saw her just a few yards out from the base on the beach at the water’s edge. “Anna!”
Slipping and sliding more than anything else, I descended the trail, clothes and skin shredding on the rocks and vegetation.
In darkness, I stumbled to the base of the jetty and headed to where I had seen her. My feet stung as if perforated by needles and my breath came in shuddering gasps through chattering teeth.
“Anna!” I screamed, helpless in the darkness to locate her. I found the water’s edge, not by sight or feel because my feet were too numb with cold, but by sound. I heard my boots splashing. I knew she was somewhere just ahead of me. Not wanting to kick her accidentally, I crawled on my knees, hand outstretched in front of me. There. As cold as the water, I found her, stiff and rigid as a corpse. “Demons!” I shouted. “Devils!” They had conjured this storm.
I pulled her into my lap and felt her neck. A flutter of a pulse flickered below my numb fingers. Perhaps it was my own pulse instead. “No!” I screamed.
As quickly as they had come, the clouds dissipated. I squinted as the sun streaked through holes in their dissolving forms. Melting ice covered the beach. In my arms, Anna appeared like a painting in which the colors were all wrong. Her lips had a sickly bluish hue that I’d never seen in nature. Ice clung to her tangled hair. “No,” I sobbed, still rocking her body against mine. “Why didn’t you take me?” I screamed. “Why not me?”
Miss Ronan got to me first but said nothing. Francine had plenty to say even before she had reached the base of the jetty. Things I’d never heard come from her lips before.
“We’ve got to get her warӀo get hemed up,” Francine said when she reached me. “Lad, turn her loose.”
I folded in tighter around Anna, racked with shudders.
“Liam, listen to me,” Francine said, pulling on my good arm, looped around Anna’s chest. “You must let us take her or she’ll die.”
“No.” I couldn’t let her go.
“You’re not thinking straight, Liam. Let us help her.”
Somewhere far away, my reason called to me and drew me back. I released my hold on Anna and she was immediately pulled away. Francine patted her back hard.
“She’s near death. Her breathing is too shallow to issue water from the lungs,” Miss Ronan said.
“Take her legs,” Francine ordered Miss Ronan. “Can you walk, lad?”
“Yes,” I answered, stiffly getting to my feet.
“Of course he can,” Miss Ronan barked, following Francine up the beach with Anna stretched between them. “He was only cold a short while.”
Deirdre met us at the door. “I’ve already heated the water bottles and collected the blankets like you told me to do, Miss Ronan,” she said as the women hauled Anna into the kitchen.
“Put a blanket on the floor, Deirdre,” Miss Ronan said, lowering Anna’s feet. “Then get me a knife from the wall. A small one.” She nodded to Francine. “Lay her down. We need to get her off her back as soon as possible in case she got water in her lungs.”
A knife in Miss Ronan’s hands was terrifying. “What are you going to do?” I asked.
She stared up at me with a look so full of malice I shuddered. “Shut up.”
“Liam, lad. Go strip out of your wet clothes and wrap in one of those blankets,” Francine said, gently cradling Anna’s head as she lowered it to the floor.
I did so as quickly as possible, then sank to my knees at Anna’s side. Miss Ronan took the knife from Deirdre and held it up to me, as if taunting. Then she ripped it through the front of Anna’s shirt and down both legs of her jeans.
“Bring a blanket,” Miss Ronan ordered Deirdre. She rolled Anna onto it on her side. “You too,” she commanded, eyes boring into mine.
“Me too what?”
“He isn’t warm enough to help her. You should use the girl,” Francine said.
Ronan glared at her. “How stupid are you? With his blood, he is already fully restore
d. We need him. His touch and voice will encourage her to fight.” She returned her attention to me. “Do as I say. Get next to her now.”
She ripped the blanket from me and I lay next to Anna just as I had done with Muireann. Only unlike Muireann, Anna was cold as ice all over. Francine put a blanket over us, casting aside the wet one in which I’d been wrapped.
“Bring me the water bottles,” Miss Ronan ordered. Deirdre scampered to the sink to retrieve them.
Francine brushed hair from Anna’s face. “Poor little thing. You hang in there, now.”
Miss Ronan pressed a flat rubber bladder filled with warm water against Anna’s chest and I held it in place. She put another between her upper thighs.
“Here, hand me one and I’ll put it on her feet,” Francine said to Deirdre.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Miss Ronan ordered. “She’s too far gone. You’ll kill her. It will cause her heart to stop.” She stood and shook her head. “She’ll likely die anyway.”
A sob escaped me.
“Go ahead and cry,” she said. “This is all your fault.”
“I’ll not be lettin’ you brutalize the boy, Brigid,” Francine said, her accent thick.
“He’s just like his mother. I warned him. I practically begged him to leave, but he refused. Now this.” Miss Ronan crossed her arms over her chest. “It should have been him.”
“Yes.” My voice broke. “It should’ve been me. If only it had been.” Unlike Muireann, Anna didn’t tremble or shiver. “Are you sure she’s alive?”
Miss Ronan placed her hand over Anna’s neck. “Yes, but barely.” She squatted down close to our heads. “You need to say whatever you can to encourage her to hang on to life. You’re the only thing that will bring her back at this point. Isn’t that ironic since it’s your fault she’s near death to begin with?” She stood and joined Francine and Deirdre on the other side of the kitchen.
Anna’s leg twitched and my heart leapt. “