THIRTY-FOUR
Grace
The scream came again, harsher and louder. Grandma sat up. Her eyes were almost black. “Go to him now,” she ordered. “Now!”
“Go to who?”
This time there was a name within the scream. “Grace!”
I knew the voice: Aidan. My grandmother fell back upon the pillows, her chest rising and falling in rapid breaths. I ran for the bedroom door, reaching it just as my mother came into the hall. She was trembling. Aidan was at the bottom of the stairs, clutching his head.
“Grace!”
“What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong?” Mama cried.
I raced down the stairs, grabbing my brother’s shoulder. “Aidan! Aidan, I’m here. What is it? Why are you screaming?”
He lifted his head from his hands. He was sweating, his eyes a startling, shimmering, hot blue. There was another peal of thunder. He flinched.
I called up to my mother, “It’s nothing, Mama; he’s just drunk again.”
He said, “I’m not drunk, dammit. And you’re coming with me.”
“Why? Did Patrick send you?”
“Come with me, Grace. Now. I mean it. There’s no time.”
Grandma’s words. “No time for what?”
He grabbed me, pulling me with him down the hallway, through the kitchen to the back door. Dusk had gone straight to an eerie black night. I’d never seen anything like it. I stopped, but Aidan jerked me forward. “Come on!”
He was dripping with sweat. His eyes looked electrified. His hair curled around his face—I saw it moving as if it were alive. I tried to pull away. “Aidan, what’s happening?”
Aidan yanked me with him outside. I stumbled, nearly falling into the yard.
“Aidan, stop! I’m afraid.”
He turned on me wildly, his eyes glowing. “They’re coming for you. I need to get you out of here.”
The Fomori. The Fianna. It hardly mattered which. Both were terrifying to me. You must choose.
Aidan glanced behind him, toward the alley. “Do as I say now, Grace. You’re to go with them. They’ll keep you safe.”
I followed his gaze. There in the alley were the Fianna: Finn leading the way, Derry and the others right behind him. Derry looked up at me.
“Oh no. No!” I wrenched away from my brother, but Aidan caught me and pulled me to his chest, holding me tight, and I felt energy coursing through him. I felt it in my fingertips. When I looked up at him, his hair was moving again, Medusa-like.
I pushed against him. “Let me go. Please, Aidan, let me go. You don’t understand. You don’t. Let me go!”
Aidan didn’t budge. He was stronger than I’d ever imagined. As strong as Derry. I could not get away. He looked down at me with a determination I hadn’t seen in a long time, a look that reminded me of when we were children playing games, and he’d never, ever let me win.
“He’ll protect you,” my brother told me.
“Aidan, you don’t know who they are!”
“They’re the Fianna,” he said simply.
The air crackled, and Aidan was quivering within it. “If you know that, then you know what they want from me. You know what they’ll do. You’re the one who told me not to go with him. Don’t you remember? ‘Don’t run off with him,’ you said. You begged me not to.”
The back gate clanged as the Fianna came into the yard. Finn’s voice rang out, “Keep hold of her!”
I struggled against my brother, who only tightened his grip.
Finn and Derry hurried over as I pounded on Aidan’s chest. “Damn you, Aidan, let me go! I don’t want this! I don’t want any of it!”
“It’s too late for that, lass,” Finn said.
“Grace, don’t,” Derry said softly. “Come with us. We’ll protect you.”
I turned on him. “I don’t trust you. I know what you did to me, and I promise you I’ll fight it. I don’t want you! I hate you!”
He staggered back as if I’d slapped him again. Even through my anger and my fear I felt how I’d hurt him. But I didn’t care.
Finn said, “You’ve a right to be angry. But we mean you no harm. Come now. Come with us.”
His tone was soothing, persuasive. For a moment, I almost believed him. The wind picked up. The clouds churned and boiled overheard. Thunder filled my ears and racked my brother’s body, though he didn’t loosen his hold on me. His hair whipped across his face. Blue lightning forked, spitting into the yard, bringing the smell of burning air and panic.
I heard the drawing of steel—a sound I knew. Battlefield swords pulled from scabbards. My brother’s energy sent shivers over my skin.
Keenan said, “Here they are.”
The Fianna had turned to face the alley—all but Finn and Derry, who didn’t take their eyes off me. Then it was as if every light in the world blew out, and we were standing in darkness.
What came next was the most terrible noise I’d ever heard: ravens screaming, a cloud of them overhead, a moving, frenzied mass. Lightning flashed so close it raised the hairs on my arms, and Aidan began to murmur something, and then there was purple lighting, too, clashing against the blue. A window opened above; my mother screamed, “Aidan! Grace! Get inside this moment! Who . . . who’s in the yard with you?”
I felt them coming, and suddenly there they were, in the alley. A tall man with an eyepatch, another with twisted hair rising above his head as he gestured toward the sky—blue lightning spinning from his hand. A beautiful woman. Three other men and beyond them a group of gang boys—ragged clothing and some of them lame and others with only one arm, and still they looked fast and deadly, their knives glowing with the reflection of the lightning. The Fomori. Not monsters but men, and no more or less frightening than the Fianna. “The Fomori aren’t as the legends say.”
“Ready,” said Finn in a low voice. The Fianna assumed fighting stances.
My brother began to glow the same way the Fianna had glowed, but I felt no pain. His hair leaped and twisted about his head. Coldly he said to Derry, “Get her out of here. Do what you must.”
Aidan thrust me away. Derry held out his hand. I recoiled, and again that hurt flashed in his eyes.
“Come with us, Grace,” he said. “Please. Come with me.”
He was a liar. He’d used the lovespot to compel me. And still his words raised a fever of longing in me.
But that fever was a lie. The truth was that he had to kill me. He had to kill me, and still I wanted him, and I was more afraid of him than I’d ever been of anything.
I wanted to be away from here. In Patrick’s arms. To be safe with him and his promises. I should never have left. I should be with him now.
Just then my mother shouted, “Patrick!” and I looked to see him rushing up the alley. Patrick, who wanted to save me. “I could be your Diarmid.”
“Grace! Don’t look at him!” Patrick yelled.
Derry reached for me. “Grace. Come with me.” I heard his desperation.
“Go to Patrick, Grace!” My mother cried from above.
The men in the alley advanced in a miasma of glowing purple fog. Finn drew a dagger from his belt and another from his boot. The other Fianna crouched, knives at the ready.
“Now, stormcaster!” Finn ordered.
My brother raised his arms. Purple lightning coiled and cracked. Thunder crashed. The clouds opened with a drenching rain. Lightning shot from his fingers. Aidan?
I couldn’t deny it—Aidan’s powers lit the sky. Finn yelled something in Gaelic. The Fianna surged forward. The ravens screamed. The battle began with the flash of knives and bodies grappling in the darkness and the rain lit only by lightning. Just like in my dreams. But I couldn’t wake from this. I could do nothing but stand there.
“Grace!” Patrick was soaked to the skin, his blond hair dark with rain.
Derry said urgently, “Trust me, Grace. You know you can. You know me. Just as I know you. We belong together.”
Just as he’d said in the kitchen, and I heard hope in his words again now. I felt the spell of him.
“Time to wager, Grace,” he whispered. “Faith or fear?”
Patrick grabbed Derry’s shoulder, jerking him around. “Leave her alone, damn you! I told you to leave her alone!”
Derry didn’t raise a hand. He looked back at me. “Your choice,” he said.
There was chaos all around. Blood in the alley. Knives and clubs, violet and blue lightning, the rain crashing down and thunder like the roaring of the world. And yet all I could see were the two standing before me.
I knew what I chose between. Safety and risk. Love and desire. My family and myself. Faith or fear. Derry frightened me. I didn’t trust him, no matter what I felt for him. He wanted too much of me, and I wasn’t ready to make that leap of faith. Perhaps I never would be. And I believed in Patrick and his love. I believed that he would help me and my family. I had known him the whole of my life. Derry had told me “Run away,” and Patrick had said “Why couldn’t we be running to something?”
“Choose well,” my grandmother had said.
Derry whispered, “Now, Grace. Please.”
And Patrick said, “I love you. You know I do.”
I stepped toward him. He held out his arms, and I walked into them, and I felt his shudder when he closed them around me, when he murmured into my hair, “Thank God. Thank God.”
I heard the rush of Derry’s breath as I pressed my face into Patrick’s shoulder.
When I looked up again, Derry was gone.