Dark Enchantment (10 page)

The air smelled like the wet ashes of a campfire coupled with the mild scent of gasoline. Locked in a fetal position, she lay trembling for hours, for days it seemed, before gathering the courage to open her eyes. She stared in disbelief at the smoking, blackened point of impact…

Only inches from where she had been standing.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” she assured herself breathlessly. “You weren’t struck.”

But Caleb
had
been. The thought hit with a brutal impact, followed by a debilitating sense of grief as she rolled to her knees. If he was still alive, and
please, please, God he is
, time was of the essence. If she didn’t get to him right away, get CPR started, he didn’t stand a chance. Arianna tried to get up, but her knees buckled and she collapsed to the ground.

Trying again, more slowly this time, she managed to get to her feet.

“It’s so cold.” She shivered as the night curled itself around her, the icy sea winds penetrating clothes still damp from her tumble onto the wet sand.

Fear held her heart in a tight fist as she searched for a way to scale the treacherous rock-faced wall. Or maybe there was another way. If the castle were a commercial establishment, she might be able to alert a hotel guest to the emergency on the grounds above.

And that was when she saw him.
The luckiest man on earth.
Not only had Caleb miraculously survived a direct lightning strike but, from the look of him, he had managed the feat with no injuries of any kind. Right now, he was leaning casually against a section of the castle’s outer wall, his fingers tucked into the front pockets of his jeans.

How could any mortal human being have lived through that direct hit and, more, been left standing?
The operative word here being mortal,
an insidious voice challenged inside her.
Stop and think. What did you
really
see? Had Caleb been struck by the lightning at all?

Chewed on her lip, Arianna focused on the image burned ineradicably into her retinas. Like a tattling child, her optic nerve kept whispering to her frontal lobe that the lightning bolt hadn’t come zigzagging through the atmosphere at all. Rather, it had leaped onto the tip of his finger as if commanded to dance an Irish jig.

The same finger he had then pointed peremptorily in her direction.

And not, as she had first thought, to dislodge the deadly thunderbolt. No, she was almost certain now that he had hurled it at her intentionally.

Arianna shivered as she recalled her impression of him at that moment. Despotic. Formidable. Cold and unfeeling. An alien entity endowed with authority over the elements.

“And that you would even consider such a thing is proof that you need to have your head examined,” she muttered aloud. What was up with her, anyway? Within the past couple of days, she had imagined the man to be…let’s see…a vampire, a fallen angel, a demon, a ghost, and the embodiment of some fabled creature from the annals of Irish folklore.

So, what is he today?
she asked herself sarcastically.
An archangel? Or maybe the devil himself? Oh, but no. Chucking lightning bolts from the sky that way, he had to be a descendent of Jove. A freaking Greek god.

That was ridiculous, of course. There had to be a logical explanation. The rogue bolt was probably the product of a hair-trigger storm churning many miles offshore. Caleb was simply a fortunate man—very fortunate indeed—to have escaped unharmed.

Glancing up to gauge the immediacy of a torrential downpour, Arianna found the moon shining brightly. A sweep of stars glittered the night sky like polished diamonds in a jeweler’s case. But just then, almost as an afterthought, a thunderclap cannoned across the heavens with a roar so deafening Arianna ducked and covered her ears. Heart pounding, her knees turned to rubber; she searched the mist-enshrouded cliffs for Caleb.

But he was gone.
He had left her alone to stand against the magic and the madness.

A haunting melody of drums and pipes road on the wind and waves. Then the breath of a whisper, a man’s voice.
“Run....”

Cold, gray fingers of fog clawed through the waves, stretching, reaching for her, as abject fear spurred her into flight. Over reef and rock and moon-colored sand she raced through the deepening twilight, leaping over shallow dunes and sandy inlets. Her throat ached, lungs burned. The thick, cloying mists dragged at her pumping legs like thick mud. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, running in place with a monster in pursuit.

Her skin crawled, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she sensed that monster stalking her. Malevolent eyes staring down at her from a scattering of boulders lining the ledge about a hundred feet overhead. The night enfolded her in a velvet shroud of impenetrable darkness, as endlessly black as time before the creation of man.

Again, she heard the hypnotic rise and fall of a man’s seductive voice urging her on. In minutes that seemed like hours, she was finally scrabbling her way back up the shingled path to where she had parked the car. As she went to unlock the door, the key slid through her nerveless fingers. “No! No!” she spit out as she swiped them off the ground and jammed them into the lock. The adrenaline rush muted the pain of a fingernail torn to the quick.

Flinging the door open, she threw herself behind the steering wheel. She slammed the door and hit the automatic locks. Stomping on the clutch, she ground the key in the ignition until it screamed in protest, then scraped into reverse. Her heart skipped a beat as the car shuddered once and died.

“Okay, okay. Do it again,” she said breathlessly. “Careful.” The engine turned over and she shifted into reverse. She punched the accelerator and the car shot backward at breakneck speed. Slamming into first gear, she spun out onto the narrow ribbon of highway, tires fishtailing and spitting a stream of sand and gravel in her wake.

Chapter Ten

S
eamus O’Donnell’s penthouse apartment looked out over Galway Bay. But as Caleb stood staring out the floor-to-ceiling window in his best friend’s apartment, the dismal weather obliterated much of the magnificent view.

“What a bollocks I’m after making of things.” Caleb groaned and turned to glare at Seamus as if he were somehow to blame. “What was I thinking? Tossing lightning bolts about as if I were some kind of bloody Greek god. And the fire,” he muttered darkly. “Not once, but
twice
, mind you, I was after lighting the hearth at her house
our
kind o’ way.” He scrubbed his face with one hand. “You know yourself, this madness must have some connection to the lucid dreams I was after telling you about.”

Caleb checked his wristwatch. Ten-forty. Turning, he stalked past the sofa where Seamus lay sprawled, and fell into a recliner adjacent to the crackling fire.

“I dreamt of her again last night.” Caleb had awakened at dawn, a layer of sweat coating his body. “I should be visiting one of my lady friends tonight, instead of yourself.” He pushed back in the recliner and slung his forearm over his eyes.

“Sorry, mate, but I can’t help you there,” Seamus commented in a dry tone. He got up and padded across the carpet-strewn hardwood floor, his movements graceful for a man his size. Almost six and a half feet of solid muscle, he had inherited his height and body mass from marauding Viking ancestors. Not their fair coloring, though. His hair was a red-tinged black, so dark the color seemed not to reflect any light at all.

Retrieving a bottle from a rosewood cabinet on the far wall, he splashed amber liquid into two glasses and shoved one at his friend. “
Uisce Beatha,”
he said. Water of life.

Caleb tossed back the Irish whiskey and mentally traced its slow, fiery burn all the way to his belly. There it spread into a warm glow, alcohol’s one and only effect on his kind.

“Thirty-eight years old,” he grumbled. “And no woman’s ever been able to wind me up the way this one’s done. Can’t help but believe it’s something to do with the
Geis.
So I’ll lose control and take her like a bloody madman. Or perform some other magical mischief revealing our existence.”

Seamus shook his head in disagreement. “We’ve been mates since we were lads. Take it from me, you’re far too tight-arsed to be worrying about losing your monumental self-control.”

Caleb pushed the recliner back again, and lay staring at the rafters as if he might find the answers he sought written there. “It’s driving me fecking demented. Every time I come close to exorcising the bleeding woman from my mind, the Fates bring us together again.” Frustration weighed heavily in his voice. “After dropping her off at home that first night, I planned to stay away from her. But then that old connection between herself and my grandmother pops up. I could scarce believe it when I heard her message on my voicemail about Granny taking ill.” His tone lost its sharp edge. “When I got to the hospital, she was there, a fair-haired sprite in a ragged shirt and faded jeans.”

“Sounds like you fancy the girl, mate.”

Caleb’s only response to the remark was a thinning of his lips. “I was bloody gutted by Granny almost dying, o’ course, so I slipped away to my secret place to sort things out.” His tone quiet, introspective, he sighed. “Damned if she wasn’t there as well, like a sea nymph dancing in the arms of the wind. Nearly had me questioning whether my musings hadn’t conjured the woman up.”

“’Twas then you sensed the evil?”

With a huff of self-derision, Caleb pushed out of the recliner. He strode back to the rain-streaked window and braced an arm on the frame. “I was so...
entranced
, I reckon is the word for it, that I wasn’t after sensing the bloody bastard ‘til he was nearly dead upon her.”

“Then you did what you had to, to get her out of there.”

“Liked to have given the wee thing a heart attack in the process—”

“But you got her away from there…away from the danger. You know, there may well be another explanation for the dreamin’.” Seamus hedged, as if mindful of the foul state of his friend’s temper. “Some of us meet…virtually grow up with our
anam cara
in the Imaginal—”

“My soul mate? Are you daft?” Turning from the window, Caleb gave his friend an incredulous stare. “You’re joking me, right? The girl’s a mere mortal, for feck’s sake? Are you forgetting that sex is forbidden? And even if mating between our races wasn’t lethal, our sexuality’s far too violent for the likes of her kind. We’re like beasts in the field, man. Raw, primitive. Sure, I’d ravage the little mortal, eat her alive.”

“And are you, my friend, forgetting that before the
geis
-imposed prohibition against sexual contact between our races, intermarriage was rampant?” Seamus smiled. “Their women quite enjoy being ‘eaten alive’.”

“And you know this how? Firsthand experience, is it?” Caleb’s mood was dark, this discussion of impossibilities making it blacker by the minute. “I still believe ‘tis the
Geis
somehow responsible for stirring all this up. And wouldn’t it explain what transpired earlier this evening as well?”

“You mean
The Knowledge.
”

Caleb gave a thoughtful nod. “’Twas that which alerted me to the sinister presence lying in wait for the girl.”

The Sense of Innate Knowledge enabled Caleb’s people, the Túatha de Danann, to witness events in the past, the present and the future, not as a vision, but in a physical state.

The past revealed itself clearly, for it was cemented in time and unchangeable. The present unveiled other locations through a fine golden mist, which dissolved into clarity as it folded into the past. Whilst the future, its nature capricious owing to the fickle will of man, presented itself darkly, a flickering image perceived through a densely matted fog of gray.

But the presence of evil cloaked the infinite timeline in an impermeable shroud of darkness to conceal its face. Just as it had done at the seaside earlier this evening.

His responsibility as Chief Brehon weighing heavily on his shoulders, Caleb scooped up his jacket and headed for the door. “Call the next meeting a wee bit earlier,” he instructed Seamus, who acted as the Council’s scribe. “Say three weeks, Tuesday. I’ll ask the girl to dinner, bring her by your restaurant Saturday night. Tell the lads we’ll be at the pub afterward. Best if they get a sense of her prior to the meeting.”

Seamus gave a brief nod. “Good plan.”

His hand on the doorknob, Caleb turned to look at his friend. “Though I can’t say for certain she’s the Chosen One, Seamus, there is a thing I
do
know. The winds of evil are beginning to blow, my friend. And sure, it’s the little mortal they’re pursing their lips at.”

* * *

The storm raged throughout the evening. Torrents of rain, driven horizontally by the wind, battered the cottage walls. Virtually brain-dead from the day’s harrowing events, Arianna dragged herself up the stairs, planning to make an early night of it. The central heat had come on automatically—for like about a minute. Not nearly long enough to combat the cold, damp chill seeping through the stucco walls. Shivering, she donned her nightclothes and finally managed to get a puny fire going in the hearth. Nothing like the three-alarm blaze Caleb had conjured, but, hey, she was only human after all.

Arianna walked over to the window and reached up to draw the curtains. A flash of lightning chased away the black of night and, in that fleeting instant, revealed a man in a hooded jacket on the wooded lot across the street. At the sight of the man hunched against the storm, she relived the fear of being pursued on the coast earlier that evening. Had the stalker somehow followed her home?

A firm yank on the drapes overlapped the panels by a yard. She clearly remembered locking the doors, but a compulsive need to check them again sent her flying down the stairs.

Back in her room, she doused the lights and sneaked a peek out a corner of the curtains. Another flutter of lightning revealed nothing but trees. Of course, the man could still be out there, hiding in the woods. Or sneaking around outside the cottage, trying to find a way in….

“Stop it!” she ordered herself. The doors and windows were locked. And in the unlikely event of a break-in, she was well able to defend herself—against
most
people.

Arianna climbed into the cold bed and curled up as tight as a rosebud, which began slowly to unfurl as her body heat warmed the crisp Irish linen sheets. The ebb and flow of the tempest outside her window proved that the events of earlier had simply been the precursor of a storm front moving in. She wasn’t a meteorologist, after all, so what did she know?

“That no human being can control the elements,” she asserted aloud, snuggling into the now cozy bedclothes.

Because no man—no matter how darkly enigmatic, how seductively charismatic he might be—possessed the power to summon a lightning bolt and hurl it through the atmosphere.

Or command a blast of thunder to explode across the sky.

Or send a whispered warning on the wind.

“No
man,” she breathed into her pillow, as the storm lulled her gently to sleep.

* * *

Arianna followed the entourage through the arched entryway and into the matchless splendor of the nave. From entrance to chancel, green marble columns supported the arches of the ground stone ceiling. A bluish light shone through acres of stained glass, and splashed colorful patterns on the golden wood of the pews and on the inlays carved delicately on the chapel walls. Plush velvet in royal blue cushioned the white stone kneelers behind the pews. Set in the south transept to her left, a stained glass tracery window depicted various Arcadian settings. There was one depicting small groups of men, women, and children beneath a luminous blue orb, which seemed more sun than moon.

Intrigued by the various paintings on the walls, Arianna was studying them when the echo of retreating footsteps alerted her that she was being left behind. There in spirit only, her wraith-like presence followed behind them, down the labyrinth of connecting hallways and into a granite mausoleum guarded by sculpted multiple-winged angels. A stone tablet carved into a Celtic cross bore the name “MacNamara” in large Ogham letters. Written in smaller script beneath were the words, “Aoife. Beloved wife, mother, daughter, sister.”

How she was able to decipher the ancient script, Arianna couldn’t fathom, any more than she could comprehend why she should be dreaming of Caleb’s mother’s funeral.

Near the front of the group, a woman, strands of gray threaded through her once dark brown hair, cradled a newborn in her arms. Her eyes were empty sockets, red and swollen with the grief she strove to bear. Granny. Arianna recognized the younger version of the woman, drawn from the inkwell of her own childhood memories. As the funeral service ended, tears glistening in the woman’s soft, blue eyes overflowed onto the tousled black curls of the infant in her arms. The baby raised his tiny head off her shoulder.

And stared unblinkingly into Arianna’s eyes.

Her heart jolted at the intensity of his emerald gaze, the hopeless sadness in his eyes.

Before she could think what it might mean, the whispery collage began to fade into another image, and she was staring into the riveting gaze of a boy of five or six. His long, dark curls danced in the gusty wind as she stood on a rocky ledge in the brambles beside him. His loneliness swamped her, as bleak and chilling as the icy mists rising from the sea below. She longed to embrace the small boy, to enfold him in her arms, to promise him everything would be all right.

But as she reached for him, the misty vignette trembled and dissolved into yet another ethereal scene. Her breath caught as she recognized the gangly adolescent who had first come to her in the silent hours of the night. And with the next shimmering transfiguration, the figure of the boy transformed into that of a man.

The man she had always loved to distraction. Caleb.

* * *

A few miles away a man sat slumped in a kitchen chair in a drunken stupor. His crusty chin sagged against his chest; saliva ran in a sour stream down inside the collar of his shirt. Rainwater dripped from his trouser legs and pooled around his feet.

Thunder ricocheted off the walls and he bolted upright, his hand wrapped around the neck of a whiskey bottle. “To meself,” he grunted, raising it in a sloppy toast.

Paying no heed to the doctor’s warnings against mixing drink with his medication, he drained the bottle, liquor dribbling down his chin as he slammed it back onto the table. He fumbled with a package of tobacco and rolled himself a fag. Letting it dangle from his slack lips, he attempted several strikes of a match before finally sucking the acrid, biting smoke into his lungs with great relish. “Another pleasure the doctors are after denying me.”

“Indeed.” A cajoling voice, that of his one true friend, surrounded him. As always, it seemed to come from nowhere, yet everywhere, at one and the same time. “You cannot trust them...not any of them.”

“No one but yershelf,” the man slurred.

“Yesss. And if you follow my instruction, you will have all your heart desires. But timing is key.” The Minion of the Beast took on an admonishing tone. “Your actions today might have cost us dearly, my friend. And bought only torment in return. For the ordained time is not yet. But soon, soon.”

“Shoon,” the man echoed. And he who had become one with the Minion, who had invited the Evil to dwell within his flesh, slumped forward again, the rolled cigarette held loosely between his thumb and index finger burning itself out on blistered flesh.