“A few singes, and I’ll see to them.”
“He’s already seen to mine.” Meara moved straight to Fin. “Clucking like a mother hen over me. What can we do for you, Fin?”
“I’m well enough.”
“You don’t look it. Should I get one of your potions, Branna?”
“I don’t need a potion. The whiskey’s fine. And you’re doing some clucking yourself, Mother.”
Meara dropped into a chair. “The way you are makes a ghost look like it’s had ten days in the tropics.”
Warming bit by painful bit, Fin smiled at her. “You’re not looking rosy yourself.”
“He kept going at her,” Connor said, and surprised Meara by lifting her up—strapping girl that she was—taking her place, then cuddling her on his lap. “He’d go for me, but that was for show. He wanted our Meara, to hurt her, so kept hammering against her protection, looking for the slightest chink. At first we tried to draw it all out, give the rest of you time, but it went on longer than we thought, and it was get serious about it, or fall back.”
“Connor made a tornado.” Meara spun a finger in the air. “A small one you could say, but impressive. Then turned it to fire. And that sent Cabhan on his way.”
“We couldn’t hold him longer,” Connor finished.
“It was long enough. We’ll all have some whiskey,” Branna decided. “Let me see where you’re burned, Connor, and I’ll tend to it.”
“I’ll do it.” Iona nudged Branna back down. “Stay with Fin.”
“I’m well enough,” Fin insisted. “It was the cold, that was the most of it. It’s so sharp, so bitter it carves the life out of you. Enervates. It’s more than it was,” he said to Branna. “More than we saw and felt.”
She sat on the floor, took one of the glasses Boyle passed around. “Tell us.”
“It was darker, darker than it was when we went in the dreamwalk. Colder, and the air thick. So thick you couldn’t get a full breath. There was a cauldron on the fire, and it smelled of sulphur and brimstone. And there were voices chanting. I couldn’t make out the words, not enough of them, but it was in Latin, and some in old Irish. As were the screams, the pleading that rose up with them. Those being sacrificed. All of that, a kind of echo, in the distance. Still, I could smell the blood.”
He took a drink, gathered himself again. “There was a pull to it, from in me. A wanting of it, stronger than before, this pull and tug in two directions. I put the crystal up, a little notch in the stones, high on the wall across from the altar.”
Now he turned the glass in his hands, staring down into the amber of the whiskey as if seeing it all again.
“And when I no longer had it with me, the need was more. Bigger. The pull more alluring, you could say. There was a cup on the altar, and in it blood. I wanted it. Coveted it. Innocent blood, that I could smell. The blood of an innocent, and if I only took it, drank it, I would become what I was meant to become. Why was I resisting that? Didn’t I want that—my own destiny, my own glory? So I stepped toward the altar, and went closer yet. All the chanting filled the cave, and those screams were almost like music to me. I reached for the cup. I held my hand out to take it. Finally just take it.”
He paused, knocked back the rest of the whiskey. “And through all the screaming, the chanting, the pulsing of that thick air, I heard you.” He looked down at Branna. “I heard you. ‘Come back to me,’ you’d said, and what was in me wanted that more than all the rest. Needed that more than the blood I could already taste in the back of my throat.
“So I backed away, and the air,
it got colder yet, and was so thick now it was like wet rags in my lungs. I was dizzy and sick and shaky. I think I fell, but I said the words, and I was out, I was back.”
He set the glass aside. “You need to know the whole of it, the full of it. How close I came. No more than a fingerbrush away from turning, and once turned, I would have turned again on all of you.”
“But you didn’t take it,” Iona said. “You came back.”
“I wanted it. Something in me was near to desperate for it.”
“And still you didn’t take it,” Connor pointed out. “And here you sit, drinking whiskey by the fire.”
“I would’ve broken trust with you—”
“Bollocks,” Branna interrupted and surged to her feet. “Bollocks to that, Finbar. And don’t sit there saying you came back for me, for you didn’t come back for me alone, or for any of us alone. You came back as much for yourself. For the respect you have for who you are, for your gift, and for your abhorrence of all Cabhan is. So bollocks. I didn’t let myself trust you in the beginning of this, and you proved me wrong time and time again. I won’t have it, I’m telling you, I won’t have you sit here after all that and not trust yourself.
“I’m going to heat up the stew. We all need to eat after this.”
When she sailed out, Meara nodded, rose. “That says it all and plainly enough. Iona, let’s give Branna a hand in the kitchen.”
When they left, Boyle went for the whiskey, poured more in Fin’s glass. “If you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, you’d do better doing it a bit drunk.”