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.’
Chapter Seven
‘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, followi
ng 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.
And, I wondered as I drifted off into a fitful sleep, I wondered who the girl was. The one who’d died with them in the Volvo that day. There’d been a body, and it definitely hadn’t been mine. So who was this girl? The girl the world thought was me …
I was having a wonderful dream. A dream where silky fingers were stroking my face and shoulders, smoothing strands of hair away from my face. I sighed and rolled on to my back. The touch continued, drifting down along the side of my neck, round to the front of my throat, light and sensual and arousing in all kinds of ways. God, it felt good. Better than good. It felt sinful, and delicious, and … real.
I jerked awake, jumped up, scrambled to the other side of the bed. There was a man in there with me, and it wasn’t Gabriel.
‘Good evening, Lily,’ he said, smiling at my reaction. His eyes – a deep, chocolate brown – were sparkling with laughter. Dark-blond hair, tucked behind his ears. Olive skin, the kind that pegged him as Mediterranean. A body to kill for, draped along the edge of the bed. Where we’d obviously been having, well, some kind of cuddling session.
‘Who are you?’ I snapped, snatching the covers and pulling them in front of me, even though I was fully clothed. Something about his look, his predatory glance, made me feel vulnerable. And confused. And just a wee bit hot.
‘I’m Luca,’ he said. ‘You have nothing to fear from me, Lily.’
He smiled as he said it, but the glimpse of sharp, shining teeth did nothing to make me feel reassured.
‘Why were you touching me?’ I asked. That wasn’t really what I wanted to know – that went more along the lines of, ‘Why didn’t it plunge me into a nightmare world of visions?’ – but it would do for starters.
‘Because I wanted to,’ he said simply, stretching out on the bed like a panther, black T-shirt riding up from jeans and flashing a glimpse of smooth, taut stomach. ‘Because you looked so pretty, like Sleeping Beauty, your skin so white and smooth. I didn’t mean any harm. Anyway, you seemed to like it. You were purring, like a little cat.’
I blushed, suspecting he was right.
‘Please don’t do it again,’ I said. ‘I don’t like people touching me.’
‘Then we have nothing to worry about. I’m not “people”. I,’ he said, letting out a fake Gothic horror-movie laugh, ‘am Vampyr!’
He bared his fangs, and I all but fell off the bed in a tangle of clothes, sheets and panic. He carried on laughing, and my fear was replaced by an urge to hit him with something very, very hard. If this was an example of vampire humour, I wouldn’t be queuing up for the Undead Comedy Club any time soon.
On the other hand, I thought, remembering the way my skin had tingled under his touch, there could be other … advantages.
‘So, you’re dead,’ I said.
‘Technically,’ he replied. ‘But I still have the full complement of male urges, if you get what I mean?’
He winked, leaving me in no doubt at all as to what he meant. And interestingly, I wondered if his non-living status meant I could give in to a few urges of my own. Did normal rules not apply with vampires? Did touching the undead somehow chase away my propensity for mind-numbing visions? Did the fact that he had no human future mean I could get a pass on the brain-freeze? I supposed it made sense … It’s not like I’ve ever had a future-flash when stroking a dog, or anything. Non-human might mean non-invasive, which was damned fine news. I’ve lived with the burden for so long, the thought of losing it, even temporarily, made me giddy.
I looked him up and down, and my newly emerging inner slut gave him the thumbs up. Being dead looked good on him.
I crawled back over the bed, enjoying the flash of surprise on his face as I kneeled next to him. This had been a day for revelations. Painful revelations that were still tormenting my mind. Would it hurt to try for a few that might feel good instead? To find out something new about myself that would result in something other than a full-blown anxiety attack? Maybe I deserved a treat. Just for a minute or two.
I reached out, tentatively touched his arm. Oh. Cold, hard. Nice. I paused: no visions. Ran my hand down to his fingers, linked mine into his. Still no hint of what his future might hold: no tears, no heartbreak, no agonising pain. Nothing apart from th
e very delicious sensation of my flesh on his. He’d gone very still, and a small warning sign flashed in my brain: he was absolutely still, like a predator tricking his prey …
I ignored it, and touched his chest, feeling only one thudding heartbeat where there should have been more. Yep, definitely dead. He looked on in curiosity as I moved further down his body, slipping my hand beneath his T-shirt and up on to his torso. Yikes. That felt really, really good – lots of ridges, smooth skin over hard muscle. Still no visions, not even that tiny spider’s web of sensation that warns me one is on its way. Different sensations instead, as I traced the contours of his abs, then further up. Nipples, erect; a trail of silky hair. Wow. So this is what a man feels like. I suddenly understood why everyone is so obsessed with sex.
‘Might be an idea to stop that now, Sleeping Beauty,’ Luca said, his voice edgy and frightening, all playfulness gone. ‘I may be dead, but I’m not that dead. Get away from me for a moment, or I might hurt you.’
I snatched away my hand and flew to the other side of the bed, scrambling off it. I settled myself down in a chair under the window, and hoped that was far enough. Great. I find a man I can touch without fear of seeing the future, and replace it with one that wants to drink my blood. Could life get any more complicated?
Right at that moment, the door to the bedroom burst open, and Gabriel stomped in, puffed up so tall with High Kingly magic he had to stoop to fit under the frame. He was, literally, almost seven feet tall, and built to match. I really needed to add that to the barrage balloon full of questions that were piling up.
His fists were clenched, and he glared at Luca, who was grinning up at him smugly. He was apparently unimpressed by the Popeye routine.
‘Are you all right, Lily?’ said Gabriel. ‘I felt … something odd.’
Ah. Yes. That would be me experiencing full-on sexual arousal for the first time ever. There wasn’t really a polite way to phrase that, so I just nodded, let the blush have its wicked way with me, and stayed quiet.
‘She started it,’ said Luca, unfolding himself from the bed and shoving his way past a now-deflating Gabriel. ‘Quite the little minx, this Mother of the Mortals.’
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