Dark Vision (17 page)

I snatched my thoughts away, felt them race from his mind like smoke billowing out of tunnels, away from the pure emotion that was too much for my poor, undeveloped psyche to handle. I was so shaken that if my body had been there with me, I’d have needed a lie-down. I retreated to the other side of the room, needing some distance between us, scared of accidentally falling into his head again, of getting sucked into a mental black hole.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, taking a step towards me.

‘Yes … no,’ I replied, feeling the equivalent of a panic attack swamp my spirit-body. My heart, back on the sofa in Fionnula’s cottage, would be racing hard, I knew. I took a breath, forced myself to calm down. A cardiac arrest wasn’t going to help anybody.

‘I’m OK, Gabriel,’ I said. ‘That was just a bit … intense. Thank you … for letting me. But I won’t be doing that again in a hurry.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘What did you see?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No – I was trying too hard not to scream like a girl. I had no control over what I was thinking, and can only hope it wasn’t anything too embarrassing. Or anything that … scared you.’

He looked deeply concerned, and I wasn’t naive enough to think he didn’t have yet more secrets hidden in that brain of his. The peace we shared, this man and I, was always fragile, and allowing me into his mind had probably taken more bravery than flying into battle with the Blade of Lugh. He’d taken a risk, made a sacrifice, and now he was starting to think he’d made a mistake. That I’d seen something so upsetting, I’d fled, trembling, across the room.

In reality, though, it wasn’t some deep dark revelation that had scared me. Not just scared me but petrified me, leaving me stunned and shaken and fluttering with the overload of it all. The shocking revelation had been that he loved me – a love so fierce that most women would kill to experience it even once in their lives.

But then, I’m not most women, am I?

I’m a woman who has lived her whole life in a bubble of quiet solitude and isolation – a life of adaptation and contented acceptance. What I’d seen – what I’d felt – in Gabriel had been the opposite of that. It wasn’t contented. It wasn’t quiet. It was loud and passionate and it blazed so bright and so hot that I was scared to go near it for fear of being consumed in the flames.

Try explaining that in words of one syllable. With time, I might be able to think my way through it – but right then, I still felt singed.

‘I need to go,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m starting to feel a bit weird. For all I know, Carmel’s shaved my eyebrows off by now. Thank you again, and I’m sorry – sorry that I did that. I shouldn’t have intruded. I don’t even have the excuse that you do, of not being able to control it. Hope I didn’t kill off any vital brain cells, or anything, by trampling round in there.’

‘I’m sure I’ll cope, Lily,’ he said, his expression telling me he wasn’t buying my light-hearted spirit-girl act. ‘Take care, and learn well – I’ll see you soon,
a ghra
.’

When I came to, Carmel and Fionnula were sitting on either side of me on the sofa, like a pair of demented bookends.

‘Oh, thank the Gods!’ said Fionnula, grabbing my hands and shaking them, hard. ‘We thought we’d lost you!’

‘I’m fine!’ I shrieked. ‘Now back off. If you breathe on me much more, I might pass out from the fumes! What’s the problem? What happened?’

‘The problem is, you kind of went unconscious,’ said Carmel, staring daggers at me. ‘For ages. Eyes rolled back in your head – not a good look, for future reference. Lady Barfly here was going nuts – said it wasn’t right. She thought something had gone terribly wrong; portents of doom and all that. And there was nothing we could do but watch, and wait. And in
her
case, belch a lot.’

‘Well, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘As you can see. Nothing wrong with me at all. Fit as a fiddle. Feeling groovy, in fact.’

I jumped up from the sofa and danced a little jig to prove I still had full use of my limbs, but it didn’t seem to do much to reassure them. Fionnula stood up as well, and managed all of three seconds upright before she tumbled back on to the sofa.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘That wine must have been corked.’

‘The first bottle, or the third?’ asked Carmel, bristling at Fionnula, and glaring at me. I’d scared her, and she was bitingly angry because of it. I’d need another Champion to protect me from the first if she carried on like this.

‘I really am all right,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry if I worried you. It wasn’t intentional. Nothing I ever do these days is intentional. So just bloody forgive me, OK?’

She thought about it for a beat or two, eyes still sparking, then held up her hands in surrender.

‘OK. As you asked so nicely, and you did that Lord of the Dance thing so well. Now tell us what
happened
.’

‘I went to him. Gabriel. I was there, in his basement, with him. He could see me, and I could see him, but I couldn’t touch him – I mean, anything, not just him. I was like a ghost, there in spirit only. And, you know, we chatted.’

I left out the parts about the mind invasion, unwilling declarations of love, and my retardo-girl response to it all. For the time being, that would remain firmly beneath my ever-expanding secrets hat.

‘You were actually there?’ said Fionnula, hiccuping at the end of the word. ‘Not just in a visualisation of it?’

‘Yes, I was actually there. In the non-flesh. Walking and talking.’

Her bleary eyes narrowed, and I noticed that the liquid eyeliner she took such a pride in applying was now most definitely smudged.

‘That’s very … interesting,’ she murmured.

‘That’s exactly what he said. What is it with you people and “interesting”?’

‘Well, sweetie, when you’ve lived as long as we have, there’s not much new under the sun, is there? Been there, done that, bought the pashmina. But for you to have had the power to do that, to go to him in your other form, is important. Especially when you’re so new to it all. Your powers are there, but still developing – and I’m only just starting to think you might be capable of a lot more than I suspected. The connection between the two of you must be impossibly strong …’

She tailed off into silence, and for a minute I thought she’d passed out cold. I started to do a visual drool check to see if she needed putting to bed, but she suddenly looked up at me, blue eyes shining with what looked suspiciously like tears.

‘Lily, you are so very, very lucky,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I replied, feeling a wave of exhaustion flood over me. I needed to rest, be alone, and recharge my now very frazzled nerves. ‘Lucky Lily. That’s me. Remind me to buy a frigging lottery ticket tomorrow, why don’t you? Now if it’s all right with you, I’m going to bed.’

The next morning, I had to fight two hungover hags just for the chance to go out on my own. I’d had a terrible night, tossing and turning so much the sheets were bound around my legs like twists of ivy.

I’d been tortured with dreams – of him, of Gabriel. And me. Of a different me, one that was ready for all of this. One that was ready to love and be loved, to share and open up and be … well, normal. Because in the midst of all this craziness, the one thing that had terrified me was that: the idea that all of this came down to love, to an equivalent of Julia Roberts’ dopey ‘just a girl, just a boy’ speech in
Notting Hill
. The thought sent me into spasms of dread. Go figure.

I showered, looked on as Fionnula prised her eyelids apart with a crowbar, and announced I was going out for a walk.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Carmel, recovering faster than her partner in wine.

‘No, you won’t,’ I said.

‘Yes, I will,’ she replied.

And thus it went on for several minutes, the two of us setting the room alight with sparkling repartee. Eventually Fionnula rediscovered the power of speech and butted in.

‘It should be safe for her, Champion,’ she said. ‘My lands are held sacred. I have my privacy here, and that is extended to my guests.’

Carmel looked like she was going to argue, but swallowed it down. Probably thinking of all the Alka-Seltzer she could glug while I was gone.

‘But,’ said Fionnula, turning to me, ‘you must promise not to leave the grounds. The barriers are all clearly marked; you can’t miss them. Not a foot outside, do you understand? Outside, I can’t protect you.’

‘From the Hooded Claw?‘’ I asked sarcastically. I knew she wouldn’t have a clue who Frankie Goes to Hollywood are, but she was annoying me. She was laying it on as thick as her foundation, and I was getting sick of being mollycoddled.

‘I don’t know what that means, but yes, if there is a Hooded Claw out there, it won’t trespass on my land.’

I nodded, and turned to leave.

‘One more thing!’ she shouted, just as I reached out to open the front door.

‘What?’

‘Take your coat. It’s pissing down out there.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ I replied, grabbing the parka and slamming the door behind me. Not very gracious, I know, considering they were worried about me. What can I say? It was that time of the month. The time of the month when I had to decide the fate of humanity and all.

She had been right about one thing – it really was pissing it down. The sky was a cracked steel grey, black clouds hovering over the distant sea like vultures spreading their wings. The temperature had plummeted overnight, and I wrapped the coat around me like one of those foil blankets they give to marathon runners.

I trudged off behind the cottage, past a neat vegetable patch and a washing line. There was a pond, the surface bombarded by raindrops, and a small family of frogs perched on the rim, looking up at me and croaking as I passed. I say frogs. They could have been people, for all I knew, suffering the wrath of Fionnula the Not-Always Fair. Just in case, I waved and smiled as I headed further down the field.

I walked for about an hour without seeing any visible boundary between this patch of land and the next. There were no other buildings in sight, and the trees were bent and withered in the wind, stripped nude by autumn. It was bleak and barren and fitted my mood perfectly.

I needed this space, out on my own getting my hair blown into tumbleweed, to think, to ponder. To give myself a damned good talking to. How would I handle it, the next time I saw Gabriel in person? How would I react? Would he realise that I’d been poking around in his brain a bit more than I’d intended? Would I be able to even speak to him without blushing? Nah, I decided. I’d never been able to do that. He was a one-man blush machine.

I was stamping a bit harder than necessary on the muddy footpath, my Docs splattered with sludge like the side of a four-by-four, streaks of rusty-brown dirt striping the backs of my jeans. I was angry. With the world, with fate; even – unfairly – with my parents, for not being around to help me with all this. Most of all, I was angry with myself. For being such a total wuss. Boo hoo, poor little Lily – a completely gorgeous man-god was in love with me, and I was crying about it.

I realised as the thought crossed my mind that I
was
crying. A lot. The tears were whipped away from the corners of my eyes as soon as they spilled, the wind was so ferocious. But, yes, I was bleating. Not a good look. I needed to get a grip. That was going to be my new catchphrase: get a grip. As soon as I was back in civilisation, I was going to get it printed up on a T-shirt, or possibly tattooed on my knuckles. I could say it to myself in my best Scouse accent: gerra grip, girl.

It wasn’t, I told myself, so bloody bad. OK, there’d been several attempts on my life during the last week. I’d been kidnapped by a bloodthirsty fairy, transported to the Otherworld, met my deceased parents, faced the news that I wasn’t even totally human, and possibly filed my last ever pop page, which saddened me more than it should under the circumstances.

And now, I had another sledgehammer to deal with – Gabriel. Not just the protector, or the Great, or the man-with-the-amazing-blow-up-body, but Gabriel, the man who had kept an eye on me for all these years. Who’d been proud of me when I thought nobody was. Who’d cursed himself for the pain he’d had to cause me. Who loved me, with every ounce of his not-inconsiderable being.

Could I live with that? I’d be a fool to not even try. And the by-product could be, you know, saving the world as I knew it. Shopping malls and all.

I turned it around and around in my head, trying to calm my hysteria, and started to feel a tiny chink of light creeping in: I could do this. I could accept Gabriel. He wasn’t perfect, but his heart was good. And his body wasn’t bad, either … Whichever way I looked at it, there could be worse fates. I would try, I decided. Try harder; be better. Live up to my alleged goddess status. I mean, how could I be a fertility goddess and not even have it in me to love a man and be loved in return? Surely that was a big part of it? How could I bless the land if I couldn’t even bless my own life?

OK, I decided as I stomped the life out of innocent ridges of muddy soil. Fresh start. Try not to run for the hills; give Gabriel a chance. Get Fionnula to show me how to stop my touch-type visions. Accept him as my mate; maybe even get laid at last, har-de-har. Put some effort into being less cynical about the world, about love. About life. And yeah, try not to get killed in the process. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one I had.

The tears started to slow, and my breathing faded back to something like normal as I slackened my pace from Olympic-standard walking speed. I was exhausted, but it had worked. I’d walked myself calm again.

I was busy wiping loose strands of hair out of my eyes when I first heard it. A tiny whimpering sound. So tiny I had to strain my ears against the wind to catch it. A mewing, faint and stricken. I glanced around, but couldn’t see anything except the wild, sodden landscape and a fence running horizontally for miles in front of me. The border of Fionnula’s land. I’d finally made it.

I walked towards the downtrodden shrubs along the base of the fence, kicking aside withered briars way past their bloom, using the toes of my boot to mooch around. Nothing there except some fat ugly woodlice. Yet still I could hear it, that pathetic, strangled mewing. It was a cat, I was sure. In distress, by the sound of it. Maybe another of Fionnula’s experiments.