Dark Vision (6 page)

We were also, I realised, still holding hands. I snatched mine away, which Gabriel took as his cue to laugh. Irritating pig.

Carmel laughed too, but hers was tinged with hysteria as she glanced around. I can’t say that I blamed her; I was feeling less than grounded myself. A natural enough reaction to our whole Beam Me Up, Scotty experience, I suppose.

The room was vast, decorated in modern block colours, furnished with black leather couches and dark wood. On one wall was a huge flat-screen TV, surrounded by fancy-looking speakers and a kitted-out games console. A bar area was home to a beer fridge and a full set of optics, with gleaming glasses in neat rows. Everything your off-duty mystical warrior would need for a spot of R&R.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Gabriel, picking up a lone magazine from the glass-topped coffee table. ‘I wasn’t expecting guests.’

Carmel stared at him, stared at me, then did what comes naturally to her: walked to the bar and poured herself a very stiff vodka.

She gulped it down, poured another one straight away, then handed me a bottle of Peroni. The journalists’ creed: if in doubt, get drunk.

I pulled off my backpack and coat, dropped them to the floor, and slumped on the sofa. God, it was comfortable, and God, I was exhausted. If this was one of my hallucinations, it was a real humdinger.

Carmel joined me, and I felt instantly better for the warmth of her body next to mine. Close enough to comfort, not too close to crowd. I may have got the shitty end of the stick when it came to my childhood, but, I was starting to realise, I’d won the friend jackpot.

‘Gabriel,’ I said, after a few minutes of silence. ‘I hate to break it to you, but the charm of your international man of mystery act has officially worn off. We need answers. And we need them now.’

He nodded, and pulled up a leather footstool, perched himself in front of us. His face was still speckled with dust, the dark waves of his hair matted with cobwebs and clumps of masonry.

‘All right, Lily. No more games. What do you want to know?’

‘We’ll start with how we got here. One minute we’re wedding crashers. The next we’re here in your shag pad. How?’

‘Shag pad?’ he replied, the corner of his mouth quirking up in amusement. Carmel made what I can only describe as a growl, and he dropped the attitude. He had more common sense than I thought.

‘Would you settle for “it was magic”?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Carmel and I replied in unison.

‘Thought not. But it is … at least, that’s the best word I can find in your language.’

In our language?
I thought.

‘Do your best to translate,’ I said, saving that particular query for later.

‘OK. This city, this place, is special. And not just in the touristy, birthplace of The Beatles kind of way. It’s special because of the energy here. The water, the land, the way they come together. Everywhere has an element of it, but sometimes, there’s … more. For the whole of its existence, it’s been a place that’s drawn people, their hopes, their dreams. Their needs. An emotional melting pot, you could call it.’

‘And that’s what gives it this … special energy?’

‘No, it’s the special energy that draws people in. They don’t understand why, but they come, and they stay. It’s not just here you find it; it’s all over the world. Parts of Dublin, too. New York. Vancouver. Cleethorpes.’

Carmel snorted on her vodka, and Gabriel smiled.

‘I was kidding about that last one. Look, you’ve heard that phrase they use, the Pool of Life? Well it’s accurate. That’s what this place is. And at certain key locations, the magic is thicker, the energy stronger. It wasn’t an accident the Palm House got built where it did. Think of it like … a power socket, waiting for someone to come along with a plug.’

‘And you’re the plug?’

‘On this occasion, yes. I used the power I found there, to get us here. I could explain the physics of it, if you like …’

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Not while I’m on my first beer. Look, I can’t argue with the fact that it happened, and maybe I’ll never understand the hows and whys of it. So for now we’ll move on – why me? Why am I involved in this? There’s nothing special about me—’

‘She has self-esteem issues,’ interrupted Carmel, a vodka-induced heat creeping over her cheeks. ‘I’ve been working on it for years. I blame her nan.’

A shadow flitted momentarily across Gabriel’s face, and his eyes darkened to a deeper shade of purple. A far stronger reaction than her flippant comment merited. There was more than met the eye there, I thought, and I wanted to find out about it, sometime soon.

‘You
are
special, Lily,’ said Gabriel, leaning forward so his face was inches from mine. ‘Very special. I don’t know how much of this you can take in in one sitting, but you at least need to know who you are.’

‘That would probably be a good start,’ I replied, feeling nervousness coil in my stomach like a pit of restless snakes. This was it. This was what I wanted to know. This was the moment we’d been building up to since we’d met … and now that moment was here, every instinct I possessed was telling me to run. From this room, from this building, from this beautiful man. From a past and a future I knew I didn’t want.

‘Don’t worry,’ he murmured, reaching out to place his hand on my knee. I saw Carmel notice, and knew she expected my usual reaction. But I let him be. I needed that contact, for once in my life.

‘You’re not Lily McCain,’ he said. ‘You know that. Coleen isn’t any relation to you at all, as I think you’d started to suspect as well. You’re not even Maura Delaney. You’re more than that. You’re Mabe, the Mother of the Mortals. The giver of life and bounty. A seer, a matriarch, the root of the whole human world.’

I opened my mouth to speak. Closed it again. Because really, what was the appropriate response to that little speech? I wanted to scream, and shout, and call him a madman. I wanted to leave all this behind, go to the office and write a review of the Dormice. I wanted to accuse him of being a liar, slap him around the face and make a grand exit, stage left.

But I couldn’t. Because as soon as he said it, I knew, somewhere deep down and hidden, that it was true. However insane it sounded, however crazy and far-fetched and
Twilight Zone
it seemed, it was true. I was Mabe. Mother of the bleeding Mortals. Whether I wanted to be or not.

‘There were three of you,’ he said, gauging my reaction until he thought it was safe to continue. ‘The power of three made you strong. But … now they’re gone. They were hunted, taken, until only you remained. You were hidden, kept safe, kept ignorant. Until now. Now they’re here, and the threat is too great to allow you that ignorance any longer.’

‘Who’s here? Who are “they”?’ said Carmel, her innate nosiness getting the better of her. My friend, the news hound.

‘The Fintna Faidh.’

‘The what-na what?’

‘Fintna Faidh,’ he repeated, pronouncing it ‘Fie’. He shook his head and sighed. ‘This is really complicated … Look, there are three realms. Let’s call them Heaven, Earth and the Otherworld. It’s more complex than that; I’m dumbing it down. There always have been three, although humans are mainly concerned with the one in the middle, apart from occasional looks towards the other two. For us, now, the two we need to be concerned with are Earth and the Otherworld. Throughout time, the three have coexisted. There’ve been skirmishes; there’ve been collaborations – usually resulting in genocides or world religions – but the three coexist, separate but together. Mostly peacefully. Mortals are regarded by the Gods and by the Otherworld as troublesome and under-evolved, but we let them be. Apart from the odd fairy-tale incursion, we leave them alone. I don’t expect you two to understand straight away, but that’s the system, and it’s always worked.’

I felt a big ‘but’ coming on, and was one hundred per cent sure I wasn’t going to like it. I’d also noticed the way he’d used the word ‘we’, neatly excluding himself from the troublesome and under-evolved category.

‘But now … the Fintna Faidh want to end that. End the duality of human and other. To extend the power of the Gods and the Otherworld, to dispense with mortals completely … and to do that, they need to stop us. You. Mabe. The Seer, the Mother of the Mortals.’

‘Stop me from doing what?’

‘From fulfilling your role in the cycle. Giving your blessing and bounty to the human world. From combining the strengths of deities with the needs of the mortals.’

‘And how, exactly, am I supposed to do that?’ I asked, fearing I already had the answer, locked away in a drawer in my brain marked ‘never to be opened’.

‘You already know how,’ he said, dark eyes looking unwaveringly into mine. ‘You’ve seen it already. You’re the Mother of the Mortals. I am the High King, Cormac macConaire. Your mate.’

‘Wow,’ said Carmel, emptying her glass. ‘This is just like being at work. I need another drink.’

She stood and walked slightly unsteadily to the bar, glass dangling from her fingers.

‘So, that’s quite a name you have there,’ she said, over the sound of free-glugging vodka. ‘What’s with the Gabriel?’

His eyes never left mine, but he grinned at the question.

‘I just liked it,’ he said.

‘Oh. Cool. And when you say you’re Lily’s – Mabe’s – whoever’s – mate, do you mean in the meet-you-down-the-pub way, or the naked-rutting-beasts way?’

‘The latter,’ he responded, ‘but you don’t need to put it so crudely.’

Her only response was a snort.

‘Are you all right, Lily?’ he asked, reaching out to touch my hand. I recoiled, told him not to touch me, and pulled the sleeves of my top tight around my fingers. Skin on skin was bad, High King or not.

‘Yeah,’ said Carmel, topping her drink off with an inch of tonic. ‘You see, Gabriel, that’s going to be a problem. That whole not-touching thing she has going on. Unless you’ve invented some fancy new way of doing it?’

I’d heard enough. Carmel was invoking the spirit of Bill Hicks to help her cope with the shock, and Gabriel was looking at me like I was nitroglycerine sloshing round in a fishbowl. Mother of the Mortals or not, I needed a break. I live on my own for a reason.

‘I have to be alone for a minute,’ I said, standing up and grabbing my backpack. ‘Where can I go?’

Gabriel stood as well, went to touch my arm to guide me, then stopped when he noticed my expression.

‘Down the hall,’ he said, following me as I walked towards the door. ‘Third on the right. Everything you need is in there.’

I nodded, felt his eyes on me as I entered the corridor, tried to ignore the fact that his gaze provoked a throbbing heat between my shoulder blades. I lost count of the doors, but needed to get away, so I grasped the first handle I saw.

‘No! Not in—’

I turned, pushed.

‘There,’ he finished lamely, rushing to catch up with me.

Inside, the room was dim, windows tightly curtained and the lights off. In the middle, an enormous bed. And on the enormous bed, the band I’d seen last night. All of them. In the centre was the woman, the voluptuous singer with the black hair. She was naked, and surrounded by the rest of the group, all nude and coiled around each other like sleeping kittens. Sleeping kittens with really big teeth.

I backed out, closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I didn’t know if they were dead, drunk or drugged, but I thought it was probably best to let sleeping vampires lie.

‘Next one,’ said Gabriel quietly, pointing further down the corridor. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk some more? I could come with you, try to explain better …’

‘No,’ I replied, hardening myself to the flicker of hurt I saw in his eyes. ‘That was enough for now. Are we safe here?’

‘Of course. We’re protected. Spells are in place, and my people are nearby. My sword is ready, and we’ll lay down our lives to keep you from harm.’

A simple ‘yes’ would have done, but there didn’t seem to be space left for ‘simple’ in my life any more. I nodded my thanks, and left him, hands hanging loosely at his sides, looking less like the High King and more like a teenager who’d just been dumped.

My room was lighter, brighter, and altogether better for being completely devoid of the living dead. My own bathroom, already supplied with towels and toiletries; a wardrobe containing clothes that were my size, if not to my taste. A few books – Celtic myths and legends, ha bloody ha – and food, in a small fridge. Hunger kicked in as soon as I saw it, and I pulled open the glass door and scooped out a ham salad sandwich and a bottle of water.

I sat down on the bed, ate, drank, tried not to think. Then I emptied out my bag, pouring the irrelevant clothes over the vivid red silk of the sheets, and found it.

The photograph. The one tangible connection I had with the people I thought of as my parents.

I didn’t even look like them, I thought, as I stroked the curled edges of the paper. My mother was blonde, round, soft. I remembered that softness: the warmth of her body when I curled up against it; the whisper of her voice as she kissed my hair. The way I’d felt so safe, so small, so happy. My father was fair as well, with sparkling blue eyes. I didn’t recall him as clearly, just knew he used to come home from work and spin me round in the air, call me his Fairy Princess. Me. Their little changeling: all gawky limbs, big green eyes and long, flaming red hair. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before, the fact that I looked so different.

I don’t suppose it was something I’d wanted to dwell on. Growing up with Coleen had been hard – cold both physically and emotionally. Remembering the days before that, when all had been well in the world of the Fairy Princess, was too raw and painful to cope with.

I touched the image of my mother’s face, allowing the tears welling up in my eyes to finally fall. She’d been my only happy memory. And now, it turned out, that one was probably fake as well.

I crawled under the silk sheets and curled up beneath them, placing the picture on the pillow next to me.

I wondered if they’d known – my parents, the Delaneys. Francis and Sarah. If they were part of the great conspiracy, or if they’d believed I was actually their own flesh and blood.