Morrigan's Cross
Page 58

“Fuck me,” Cian muttered and sucked on burned flesh and welling blood. “I guess you need a weapon to best me.”
“Aye, f**k you. I don’t need anything but my own fists.” Hoyt reached up, had nearly yanked off the chain. Then dropped his hand when he realized the utter stupidity of it.
“This is fine, isn’t it?” He spat out the words, and some blood with it. “This is just fine. Brawling like a couple of street rats, and leaving ourselves open to anything that comes. If anything had been nearby, we’d be dead.”
“Already am—and speak for yourself.”
“This isn’t what I want, trading blows with you.” Though the fight was still on his face as he swiped blood from his mouth. “It serves nothing.”
“Felt good though.”
Hoyt’s swollen lips twitched, and the leading edge of his temper dulled. “It did, that’s the pure truth. Holy martyr, my ass.”
“Knew that would get under your skin.”
“Sure you always knew how to get there. If we can’t be brothers, Cian, what are we?”
Cian sat as he was, absently rubbing at the grass and bloodstains on his shirt. “If you win, you’ll be gone in a few months. Or I’ll see you die. Do you know how many I’ve seen die?”
“If time’s short, it should be more important.”
“You know nothing of time.” He got to his feet. “You want to walk? Come on then, and learn something of time.”
He walked on through the drenching wet so that Hoyt was forced to fall in beside him.
“Is it all still in your hands? The land?”
“Most of it. Some was sold off a few centuries ago—and some was taken by the English during one of the wars, and given to some crony of Cromwell.”
“Who is Cromwell?”
“Was. A right bastard, who spent considerable time and effort burning and raping Ireland for the British royals. Politics and wars—gods, humans and demons can’t seem to get by without them. I convinced one of the man’s sons, after he’d inherited, to sell it back to me. At quite a good price.”
“Convinced him? You killed him.”
“And what if I did?” Cian said wearily. “It was long ago.”
“Is that how you came by your wealth? Killing?”
“I’ve had nine hundred years and more to fill the coffers, and have done so in a variety of ways. I like money, and I’ve always had a head for finance.”
“Aye, you have.”
“There were lean years in the beginning. Decades of them, but I came around. I traveled. It’s a large and fascinating world, and I like having chunks of it. Which is why I don’t care for the notion of Lilith pulling her own sort of Cromwell.”
“Protecting your investment,” Hoyt said.
“I am. I will. I earned what I have. I’m fluent in fifteen languages—a handy business asset.”
“Fifteen?” It felt easier now, the walking, the talking. “You used to butcher even Latin.”
“Nothing but time to learn, and more yet to enjoy the fruits. I enjoy them quite a bit.”
“I don’t understand you. She took your life, your humanity.”
“And gave me eternity. While I may not be particularly grateful to her as it wasn’t done for my benefit, I don’t see the point in spending that eternity sulking about it. My existence is long, and this is what you and your kind have.”
He gestured toward a graveyard. “A handful of years, then nothing but dirt and dust.”
There was a stone ruin overcome by vines sharp with thorns and black with berries. The end wall remained and rose in a peak. Figures had been carved into it like a frame, and had been buffed nearly smooth again by time and weather.
Flowers, even small shrubs forced their way through the cracks with feathery purple heads drooping now, heavy from the rain.
“A chapel? Mother spoke of building one.”
“And one was built,” Cian confirmed. “This is what’s left of it. And them, and the ones who came after. Stones and moss and weeds.”
Hoyt only shook his head. Stones had been plunged into the ground or set upon it to mark the dead. Now he moved among them, over uneven ground where that ground had heaved, time and again, and the tall grass was slick with wet.
Like the carving on the ruin, the words etched into some of the stones were worn nearly smooth, and the stones bloomed with moss and lichen. Others he could read; names he didn’t know. Michael Thomas McKenna, beloved husband of Alice. Departed this earth the sixth of May, eighteen hundred and twenty-five. And Alice, who’d joined him some six years after. Their children, one who’d left the world only days after coming into it, and three others.
They’d lived and died this Thomas, this Alice, centuries after he’d been born. And nearly two centuries before he stood here, reading their names.
Time was fluid, he thought, and those who passed through it so fragile.
Crosses rose up, and rounded stones tilted. Here and there weedy gardens grew over the graves as if they were tended by careless ghosts. And he felt them, those ghosts, with every step he took.
A rose bush, heavy with rich red blooms grew lushly behind a stone no taller than his knees. Its petals were sheened like velvet. It was a quick strike to the heart, with the dull echoing pain behind it.
He knew he stood at his mother’s grave.
“How did she die?”
“Her heart stopped. It’s the usual way.”
At his sides, Hoyt’s fists bunched. “Can you be so cold, even here, even now?”
“Some said grief stopped it. Perhaps it did. He went first.” Cian gestured to a second stone. “A fever took him around the equinox, the autumn after... I left. She followed three years after.”
“Our sisters?”
“There, all there.” He gestured at the grouping of stones. “And the generations that followed them—who remained in Clare, in any case. There was a famine, and it rotted the land. Scores died like flies, or fled to America, to Australia, to England, anywhere but here. There was suffering, pain, plague, pillage. Death.”
“Nola?”
For a moment Cian said nothing, then he continued in a tone of deliberate carelessness. “She lived into her sixties—a good, long life for that era for a woman, a human. She had five children. Or it might’ve been six.”