by Lily Silver
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? How could you not know?”
“Never met her.” Her father replied. “She abandoned you as a babe.”
Nausea flooded Tara’s nostrils and clogged her throat as she rose to her feet.
Abandoned, as an infant? Her mother didn’t want her? No, it wasn’t true.
Tara’s world was crashing in about her. A hot surge of white pain shot through her head, as distorted bits of recurring dreams collided in her mind with the veracity of a bullet hitting a brick wall.
Bored with waiting for her mother to finish gathering, Tara wandered along the shoreline, skipping, dancing, turning a circle and then running into the incoming waves. Her hair was loose, blowing in the wind. She was happy, carefree as she wandered along the quay, away from the broken hull of the ship and her family. There would be great feasting and dancing tonight deep inside the mountain fortress. Tara loved the pretty things her mother and her brothers brought home to her; the shiny gold disks felt cool and smooth in her hands and shimmering rocks of every color that were her toys.
She loved the music most of all … tonight … there would be music in the halls.
Tara cradled her head in both hands, she tried to stand, and sank to the floor on her hands and knees as her mind was catapulted into the distant past.
Adrian was pleased. MacNeill had given him what he wanted. Not only answers about Tara’s past, but also his unswerving allegiance. Should questions be raised regarding her appearance here and their hasty marriage, MacNeill would verify the story Adrian circulated months ago of his engagement to a girl he met in Europe.
Adrian promised MacNeill to never betray Tara with another, lest the fury of the Tuath an Danaan be leashed upon him and his descendants. Tara was indeed a gift to be treasured, Dan reminded him severely, a gift from the enchanted race. Dan in turn had promised because of his marriage to Tara, the Dillons had secured an alliance with the fey race. He poured himself a draught of brandy, humming the ballad Tara had been singing for the past weeks as he gazed out the window for a sign of Dr. Magnus.
“Your every wish will be a wish that I will make come true, and if you want the moon I swear I’ll bring it down for you …”
He liked the catchy lines Tara often sung to herself. As Adrian would have expected, it was a song of enchantment, the tale of a man from the fairy race named Meatloaf, whose love for a mortal woman moved him to prove himself for her.
He hummed the melody as he waited for the doctor to arrive.
Adrian had learned Tara and her father had indeed come from a faraway place. They had been magically zapped into the Bay of Bantry by some mysterious supernatural force. MacNeill claimed it was lightning and something about waves of energy in the atmosphere. Adrian drew his own conclusions. It was magic. Fairy magic. Hadn’t the giant said what Adrian deemed magic, his people considered a natural occurrence?
“My Lord, come quick.” Young Maggie’s voice intruded upon his revelry.
“Is MacNeill worse?” Adrian turned about to find the young girl pale as death and near tears as she wound her hands inside her apron fretfully.
“No, Sir, ‘tis my lady.” The words sent a dagger into his heart.
Chapter Twenty Three
In the morning mists, amid the rumble of thunder in the sky above, Tara stood at the edge of the shore while her mother and brothers picked through the scattered remains of last night’s shipwreck. Her dress of gossamer silk rustled about her legs as the waves rushed over her bare feet. She had just three winters behind her, a trifling amount when living among beings who had endured for centuries and millennia.
Tara held out her arms, enjoying the sensation of freedom, hoping one day she would be able to grow wings and fly, like most of the grown-ups around her. Her mother couldn’t fly anymore. A sea creature had tore off one of her wings. Her brothers could fly, however. As their darling baby sister, she was given plenty of rides as they lifted her in their arms spread their silvery wings and soared through the skies.
Usually she had to stay home when they were plundering. This time she had been taken along. Mother made her promise to stay on the shore and wait for them, to not get in the way of the men as they worked hard to claim what the sea had taken from the mortals who dared to cross the rolling waves on their wooden ships.
A crab skittered across the wet sands. It was blue, a pretty color. Her favorite color. Tara chased after it with glee, hoping she might capture it and take it home to live amid the pretty jewels in her room. A shadow crossed her path. She looked up. A darkling fey of a rival mountain clan stood over her with shining black raven wings extended.
“What are ye doin’ here, on the western boundary? Stealing our tribute from the sea god again! These are our waters, and our bounty. I’ll fix you and your thievin’ kin.”
The Darkling Fey lunged at her. Tara screamed. It was too late. He gathered her up into his arms and soared into the air high above the ocean swells. She tried to wriggle from his powerful grasp. She couldn’t, he was too strong.
Tara glanced down at the broken ship far below them on the rocks. She saw her mother look up with horror and run across the shore in pursuit. “Tara … Tara!” Her mother shouted, falling to her knees in the wet earth with defeat as she couldn’t fly.
Her brothers rose up into the air on their elegant wings, one by one, in hot pursuit of her kidnapper. The Darkling Fey would not be caught. He darted up and away with cry of triumph, holding Tara aloft above his head as if she were a pagan sacrifice as he flew up into the crackling, swirling gray clouds flashing with bright streaks of light.
Tara heard the Darkling Fey Prince laughing and her mother’s silvery voice calling her name with desperation. “Tara … Tara!”
And then she heard nothing as fiery whips of energy snapped, bit and stung her tender flesh. Her captor suddenly released her. He cringed and curled into a tight ball of pain as his wings began to smoke. The awful smell of burning feathers filled her nose.
Tara was falling … falling … hurtling toward the Earth as her world was transformed in those brief moments from ultimate joy to utter darkness and pain.
“Tara?”
The soft, feather mattress cradled her aching frame.
Tara opened her eyes, resenting the intrusion of a revolting stench, light and sound.
Burnt feathers. She recoiled, pushing Cora’s hand away from her face.
“Oh, God, it hurts.” She whimpered, shutting out the candlelit chamber.
“Tara, stay with us.” A masculine hand stroked her face. She opened her eyes, slowly this time, hoping the glaring pain would not stab through them again.
The light pierced her eyeballs and invaded her brain. She groaned and draped her arm over her eyes. “The light, make it go away.”
“There, lass.” The familiar voice soothed as the heavy bed-curtains were unbound to block the light near her head. “All is well, you’re here with us again.”
She gazed up at the handsome dark haired man hovering over her. Hot. Tara racked her brain. She should know this man. They were close—lovers—weren’t they?
He smiled down at her, and yet she saw worry in his silver eyes. “Let Dr. Magnus have a look at you.”
Tara nodded, too weak to protest his request, despite her questions regarding the medical abilities of the elderly man standing beside Mr. Romance Cover Model.
As she expected, the old man could find nothing wrong. Dr. Magnus looked into her eyes, took her pulse and asked about her odd collapse. Finally, he shook his head, clueless about her condition. “Perhaps her father should have a look.”
Tara gasped, looking from one man to the other. She didn’t have a father. She was an orphan, so they’d told her. She’d been found as a child wandering the shores of Green Bay, without clothes. She’d been three or four years old, so they told her. She didn’t recall her past so she believed she was human, just like those around her.
As she lay weak and s
pent on the pillows, Tara realized the fragments haunting her dreams could be true memories after all. She didn’t recall having the images fit together in a precise sequence like this before. They were usually just jumbled impressions. The recurring nightmare of wandering the deserted seashore as a helpless child and seized by an enchanted being with dark, feathery wings seemed merely a subconscious glitch of Freudian dimensions that could never be fully explained or understood.
Tara remembered everything with crystal clarity. Even the deep hurt at being pushed from one foster home to another, and finally institutionalized in a halfway house as a teen because she was different, because she wasn’t quite normal, not quite human. She was deifiur leasghalmhar, half sister—a term for those of half fey blood. Her father had been human, her mother a Sidhe.
It was happening all over again. She’d been jerked away from the familiar life she built for herself in a small town in Wisconsin and plunged into a world where she didn’t belong. The fear coursing through her mind was as heavy as the quilts tucked about her.
How had she lost her way again; this time ending up married to an Irish lord?
Adrian was his name. Her mind searched for the closest connection: Highlander. Duncan MacCleod. No, that wasn’t right. This dude was Irish, not Scottish. Tara watched the Highlander series back in middle school. She felt an uncanny connection to the character. Mac was an immortal. He had to hide his true self from the humans he lived among and powerful enemies stalked him, seeking to destroy Duncan. And there were the lightning sequences that left her mesmerized, sitting on the edge of her seat as powerful arcs of lightning zapped Duncan’s body during the quickening in each episode.
The doctor cleared his throat. He’d been watching Tara in those brief moments as she tried to orient herself to this new reality. The old man excused himself, saying he would wait for Adrian in the library. Adrian nodded and turned back to Tara, giving her a glimpse of his soul. The fear and the love she saw in his eyes were undeniable.
“You frightened us, love.” Adrian bent to kiss Tara’s brow and stroked her cheek with affection. “You’ve complained of a recurring headache for almost a week. I should have paid it more mind.” His silky, sexy brogue caressed her ear, giving her gooseflesh as he whispered and brushed soft kisses against it.
Whatever circumstances brought her here didn’t matter as she gazed into Adrian’s adoring eyes. This man accepted her as she was. He didn’t think she was strange or spooky. That was why she had never been adopted. The humans of the future time sensed something different about her as a child and it made them uneasy. The mortals in this time still revered the fey and accepted their existence among men.
“How is she?” A familiar voice bellowed from the hall. The tall figure standing in the doorway brought a rush of welcome relief. She’d recognize that deep baritone anywhere.
Adrian rose from the bed and moved to the door. The two men exchanged a few words then Dan limped forward, a lumbering giant advancing slowly toward her, leaning heavily on a cane. Lurch. They called him that at the radio station because of his towering height and his propensity to groan a lot, like the Addams Family character.
“Well, my chick, you gave us all a good scare.”
Adrian watched him from the door and with a nod to Tara, he left them.
Tara pulled herself up on one elbow to look at Dan. His clothing was the same as Adrian’s and the doctor’s, breeches that ended below the knee, a linen shirt, silk vest and a lace jabot frothing from his throat. Dan didn’t wear fancy dress clothes. Jeans and a Brewers T-shirt or a Packer sweatshirt, as weather and the sports calendar dictated.
“Dan?” Tara exclaimed, “What are you doing here?”
He advanced slowly, looking about as he whispered, “You know who I am?”
“Don’t be silly. How did you get here? Where are we? Who is that dude who keeps hovering over me as if I’ll vanish into thin air—and that ancient doctor–he looks like he belongs in an old horror movie. Does he hold an actual license to practice medicine?”
“Slow down, kid.” Dan cautioned, pulling a pipe out of his vest pocket. He grabbed a candle from the nightstand, lit the bowl, sucked the flame for a few seconds and put the candlestick back. He sat down on the bed beside her with a grimace.
“I thought you smoked camels.” Tara observed. “Where are we? Have we been Punk’d?”
“God, I wish.” Dan chuckled and shook his head. “Be a hell of a lot easier. It’s not a matter of where we are, but when. We’re stuck two hundred years in the past, Tara.”
“Crap.” Tara leaned back into the pillows, exhausted by the news.
“Yeah, exactly.” Dan quipped with his usual bored sarcasm. “No Green Bay Packers, no Superbowl. Sucks big time.”
“The first draft of my thesis paper is due in a month.”
“Well, if you get back to 2012, I’m sure you’ll write a doozey.”
“Where exactly are we?” She gestured about the room with antique furnishings. “Did I crack up or something? Dan, I married a complete stranger!”
“No, now don’t get all melodramatic on me, kid. You’re recovering from acute amnesia, with a little PTSD thrown in. When I arrived here, you thought I was your father. So did Dillon so I played along. We are in County Cork, Ireland, on the Beara Peninsula north of the Bay of Bantry, to be exact. ”
Dan paused, taking a long puff on his pipe as he watched her reaction to his words.
“Here it is, genuine shit served on a silver platter: we’re stuck here, Tara, stuck in 1798. It’s not all bad. You’re a survivor; you married the rich dude and we’re living on his dime. Long as we—er you,” Dan jerked his thumb at Tara, “keep his lordship happy, we’re in good. If not, we’re out on our ass in the cold Irish countryside. Sorry, kid, that’s the lay of the land in this region of Oz.”
Tara nodded, accepting his assessment. He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already figured out. Without money, credit, or even a phone so she could call someone, they were dependent on Adrian’s benevolence. Adrian took her in, and apparently Dan, too, assuming he was Tara’s father. “How did this happen? What brought us here?”
A long sigh answered her. Looking down at her with sympathetic eyes, Dan puffed his pipe thoughtfully. The tobacco scent lingered between them, wreathing them with smoke. At last, Dan shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I’m an engineer not a scientist. We were working at the radio station. I was hooking up the transmitter to the generator because of the lightning storm and you were getting ready to reboot the transmitter on my signal. As far as I can figure, lightning struck the radio tower and went straight down through the transmitter at the exact moment you rebooted the system and began entering the frequency code.” Dan rose to pace in front of her as he sucked in his precious tobacco smoke and released it in a long string of grey.
“Next thing I knew, I woke up in a cottage almost thirty miles from here,” He continued. “Someone fished me out of the bay. They thought I was dead, and I came back to life. It was just lightning shock. These yokels don’t understand that. And you woke up here.” He gestured to the elegant furnishing about them. “I didn’t find you until two weeks ago, and you were married to Dillon and quite content to be so.”
Tara studied the plush canopy above her head, her mind’s eye seeing flashes of pure white light, swirls of blue, as energy crackling about her. “I remember.” She murmured The lightning again. She couldn’t forget those torturous moments of pain. She’d been burned by the energy surge. She lifted her hands in the air before her, examining the palms. “My hands were burned. I woke up in a puddle of water. It was freezing cold. I couldn’t get up, I was paralyzed.”
“Lightning paralysis. Common. It’s a miracle we’re even alive, kid.”
“The soldiers found me. They accused me of being a spy. They were going to hurt me, and then he came; a masked man named Captain Midnight. I’ve since learned that it was really Adrian. I passed out, and woke up here. I didn’t know who
I was—he told me I was his fiancée from America, that I came here on a ship to marry him, and the ship I was on went down and I alone survived. He lied to me. He took advantage of me when I was helpless. He even fed me some story about it not being safe for me to go live at the Inn if we didn’t marry, and … that it would cause a scandal if I lived here without marrying him… . he lied to me, Dan!”
“Hey, hey, take it easy, now.” Dan moved quickly to the bed and sank down beside her. He took Tara’s hands in his, squeezing them. “Its okay, Tara. The soldiers believed you were a courier carrying valuable information to the rebels.” Dan leaned forward, giving her an imploring look. “And, believe it or not, there was a shipwreck the night we came here. Lightning struck the mast during the storm and the whole thing toppled over, everyone died. Adrian concocted a false identity for you so no one would question how you came to be here or accuse you of being a spy and arrest you.”
“You mean, he was protecting me?” Tara answered with awe.
“Yes, and at the same time he was protecting himself, too. He needed a bride—fast—or his own house of cards was going to fall. He was being blackmailed—“
“Yes, I know about that.” Tara interrupted him. “The sheriff suspects he’s Captain Midnight. He wanted Adrian to marry his daughter, making her a countess.”
“And then you appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, out of the future, we know, and yet out of the magic of mists as far as he is concerned. At first, even Adrian thought you were a rebel spy. He was trying to protect you. You were injured, unconscious, so he brought you here to keep you safe. And then, he came to believe you were a fairy, sent to him by magic to rescue his sorry ass. The dude still swears by that delusion. Can you believe it? Fairies.” Dan scoffed with a toss of his head. “Superstitious dolt!”
Tara pursed her lips and nodded, agreeing with Dan on the surface. Like most mortals of the future, Dan would think she was nuts if she told him it was true. “Yeah, go figure.” She murmured, giving him a weak smile.