Dreamfever
Page 84

Where ninety-seven-year-old Nana O’Reilly was waiting for us.
I’d seen crofters’ cottages before, but this one took the cake. Illuminated by the Hummer’s headlights, it was a study in whimsy. An uneven stack of field rock, thatch, and moss tumbled across a yard of tiered gardens that, in summer, would yield a profusion of blooms, garnished by fanciful statues and Escher-esque stone fountains. Beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean glistened silver in the moonlight, salting the breeze.
There were no Shades here. The perimeter of the yard was heavily warded.
As we drove over the line of demarcation, I flinched. Barrons had absolutely no reaction. I’d been watching him carefully since the moment our headlamps picked up the faint silvery glow, curious to see if the wards would bother him.
He was the portrait of perfect impassivity.
“Do you even feel them?” I asked, irritated.
“I know they’re there.” Typical Barrons nonanswer.
“Do your tattoos protect you?”
“From many things. From others, no.” Another nonanswer.
We got out and made our way up the nearly overgrown flagstone path to the cottage door. It was green, painted with many symbols. The misshapen shamrock was unmistakable. Nana O’Reilly knew of our order. How?
Kat opened the door when I knocked. She’d hurried to the cottage ahead of us, hoping to smooth our way with tea, fresh water, and crates of supplies from town for the old woman.
I peered into the cottage. Candles burned and a brisk fire crackled.
“I’ll be getting me own door, I will. I’m no’ dead yet!” Nana O’Reilly nudged Kat aside. She wore her gray hair in a long braid over one shoulder. Her face bore the wrinkles of an old sea captain, from nearly a century of living on the shore, and she had no teeth. She gave Barrons a rheumy look and said, “The likes o’ ye’ll be findin’ no bide ‘ere!”
With that, she yanked me inside and slammed the door in Barrons’ face.
“What kind of likes is that?” I said, the instant the door was closed.
Nana gave me a look that suggested I might just be too stupid to live.
Kat settled the old woman in a chair near the fire and draped a faded quilt of many patterns and fabrics about her shoulders. The blanket looked as if it had been made decades ago from leftover patches of her children’s outgrown clothes. “I’ll be asking you, too,” Kat said curiously. “What likes is that?”
“Air ye daft, lasses? No’ our kind.”
“We get that, but what is he?” I said.
Nana shrugged. “Why would ye care? There’s white, and there’s not white. Wha’ more need ye ken than tha’?”
“But I’m white,” I said quickly. Kat gave me an odd look. “I mean, you can see that Kat and I are like you, right? We’re not like him.” If she could discern people’s true natures, I wanted to know mine.
Her rheumy brown eyes fastened on me like muddy leeches. “Ye color yer hair, ye do. Wha’s the truth o’ it?”
“Blond.”
She closed her eyes and went so still that for a moment I was afraid the old woman had fallen asleep.
Then her eyes snapped open and her mouth parted on a gummy O of surprise. “Love o’ Mary,” she breathed, “I ne’er forget a face. Yer Isla’s git! I’d no hae thought to see ye again ere I passed!”
“Git?” I said.
Kat looked stunned. “Daughter,” she said.
My mother’s name was Isla O’Connor.
I had the unmistakable look of her, Nana told me, in the shape of my face, the thickness of my hair, my eyes, but most of all in my carriage. The way my back flowed into my shoulders, the way I moved, even the angle at which I tilted my head sometimes when I spoke.
I looked like my mother.
My mother’s name was Isla O’Connor.
I could have repeated those two thoughts over and over for hours.
“Are you sure?” I had a lump in my throat I could barely swallow around.
She nodded. “Countless were the days she an’ me Kayleigh played in me gardens. Were yer locks blond, lass, I’d o’ been mistaking ye for her haint.”
“Tell me everything.”
Nana’s eyes narrowed. “She carried something, was ne’er wi’out it.” Her gaze clouded. “Though later, ‘twas lost. Ken ye what it was?”
“From the Seelie?”
Nana nodded, and my eyes widened. Slowly, I reached inside my coat and pulled out the spear. “My mother carried this?”
Nana’s eyes disappeared in nests of wrinkles as she smiled. “I fashed ne’er to see it again! Heard tell ‘twas fallen to nefarious hands. Blazes wi’ the glory o’ heaven, it does. Aye, yer mam carried the Spear of Destiny, and me own dear Kayleigh carried the sword.”
“Everything,” I said, dropping to Nana’s knees by the fire. “I want to know everything!”
Isla O’Connor had been the youngest sidhe-seer to ever attain the position of Haven Mistress—spokeswoman for the High Council—in the history of the abbey. Such a gifted sidhe-seer had not been born for longer than any cared to recall. The Grand Mistress feared the ancient bloodlines had been too diluted by reckless and unsupervised unions to again produce such offspring. Just look at those gallóglaigh MacRorys and MacSweenys, breeding with the Norse and Picts!
“Gallowglass,” Kat clarified for me. “Mercenary warriors of a sort.”