The Undivided

by Jennifer Fallon; Jennifer Fallon

  ‘Mother of God!’ a voice hissed below them. ‘Ren? Is that you?’

  Alarmed, Darragh glanced down to find the man who’d been driving the Bentley staring up at them. Patrick, he recalled the man’s name was, a name accompanied by a warm feeling of trust and affection that rivalled, if not exceeded, Rónán’s affection for his mother.

  But was this a man they could trust?

  Darragh would know soon enough.

  ‘Don’t look up!’ Sorcha hissed at him angrily. ‘Someone might be watching!’

  Patrick immediately looked away, which gave Darragh hope. If the man was planning to betray their presence, he could already have shouted out for the nearby Gardaí and they’d be swarming the tree as they spoke.

  ‘What have you done with my Hayley?’ Patrick called up to them in a loud whisper.

  The question was critical, Darragh realised. This was Hayley’s father.

  ‘Nothing,’ he whispered loudly, scanning the people on the fairway for any indication their conversation had been noticed. ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Then where the fuck is she, lad? And don’t give me any bullshit.’

  Ah … that was the problem. We sent her through a rift to another realm so her blindness could be healed by magic, wasn’t going to get him very far.

  ‘I can explain,’ Darragh told him in a low voice. ‘But not here. Can you help us?’

  Patrick risked a glance up at them. ‘Who’s yer one?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘She the one pretending to be old Jack’s kin?’

  ‘No.’

  Patrick hesitated, thrusting his hands into his pockets, as he turned to look at Kiva. She was wagging her finger at Inspector Duggan, loudly demanding to know what the Gardaí had done to find her son and rescue her cousin’s daughter, because clearly this mystery girl nobody could identify was pulling all the strings and her poor Ren was just a dupe in her evil plan. Apparently, Kiva didn’t accept for a moment that Ren was responsible for Hayley’s disappearance, even though by the sound of it, she’d seen the CCTV tapes from St Christopher’s already and was in no doubt as to the identity of the young woman’s kidnappers.

  ‘You promise me my girl’s not been hurt?’ Patrick asked after a time.

  Darragh nodded. ‘I swear.’

  Patrick looked around for a moment. ‘Can you get to the car park?’

  ‘We’d never make it,’ Sorcha said. ‘Darragh is injured.’

  Patrick glanced up at her uncertainly. ‘Who?’

  Darragh nearly fell out of the tree in shock when he clearly saw the chauffeur’s face for the first time. ‘I’ve sprained my ankle,’ he explained quickly. And then he turned to Sorcha and mouthed Call me Ren. There would be time later to explain who he really was.

  Patrick debated the issue for a long, tense moment and then, with an air of studied nonchalance, walked casually to the back of the car, which was parked directly beneath the overhanging branch where they were concealed. He popped the trunk with the remote control and bent over the large empty compartment, pretending to fix something inside.

  ‘You reckon you can jump into the trunk?’ Patrick asked, glancing toward the car park. The media were desperately trying to get a shot of Kiva. The raised trunk offered a small and not very effective shield against their long, curious lenses. The trunk of the tree shielded them from the Gardaí around the stone circle.

  ‘What if someone sees us?’ Sorcha asked.

  ‘Then we’re all screwed, lassie.’

  They didn’t have any time to quibble about it, in any case. Patrick was offering them a way out, although once they were in the trunk of the car — a trunk considerably larger than the one they’d confined Warren in — they would be at Patrick Boyle’s mercy.

  Darragh had no choice but to trust Rónán’s feelings, and his own, about the dependability of this man. ‘Move back.’

  Patrick did as he asked and Darragh turned to Sorcha. ‘You go first.’

  She nodded and with a lithe grace that belied the cold night they’d spent cramped in the branches, she lowered herself down, landing in the Bentley’s trunk with hardly a sound.

  They waited, holding their breath to see if anybody had noticed, but nobody raised the alarm. Kiva was still telling off Inspector Duggan. The press were still trying to get a shot of it, and the rest of the police were too intent on searching the ground for clues.

  ‘Okay, now your turn!’ Patrick hissed.

  Darragh didn’t land nearly so silently or elegantly as Sorcha. As soon as he landed, however, Patrick started to close the trunk. Darragh managed to move around a little until he and Sorcha somehow managed to fit. It was then that Sorcha gasped as she spied Patrick’s face clearly for the first time.

  ‘Don’t know how long it’s gonna be before I can let you out, laddie,’ Patrick told them softly, as Darragh elbowed Sorcha sharply to warn her to remain silent. ‘Try not to make any noise.’

  ‘Thanks for this, Patrick.’

  ‘You can thank me, lad,’ Patrick Boyle told him with a frown, ‘by bringing back my girl.’ And then he slammed the trunk shut, and they were plunged into darkness.

  Sorcha wiggled uncomfortably behind Darragh. It was cramped but blessedly dry and surprisingly warm.

  ‘Wonderful plan, Leath tiarna,’ she said softly. ‘We are now locked in the darkness at the mercy of the man who thinks you kidnapped his daughter.’

  ‘He won’t betray us,’ Darragh whispered back.

  ‘Why?’ He could hear the scepticism in her voice. ‘Because he looks like Amergin?’

  He knew she’d seen it. That’s why she gasped. ‘Amergin took a magical oath to protect the Undivided. I believe that oath holds true for his eileféin.’

  ‘Amergin stole your brother from you and threw him through a rift with the express intention of sundering the Undivided at the behest of a sídhe,’ she reminded him, her body pressed against his like a sleeping lover.

  ‘But don’t you see?’ he asked softly, wishing there was room to turn and face her so he could explain what was suddenly so clear to him. And hoping there was nobody outside listening to them. ‘Amergin sent Rónán to his eileféin. Why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he was a vain, self-centred fool as well as a traitor?’

  ‘He knew his oath would transcend realms,’ Darragh whispered, certain of the truth of it. He knew Amergin better than Sorcha.

  ‘Then you might want to consider something else,’ Sorcha told him, clearly unhappy with him. ‘If the man who just locked us in this pitch black box, with a vague promise of release, is the eileféin of your good friend and loyal traitor, Amergin, then his daughter — the girl you and your brother just sent through the rift — is Trása’s eileféin.’

  Darragh hadn’t thought of that. ‘I suppose you’re right. Why?’

  ‘Because if she is, and the Tuatha ever discover what you’ve done, Leath tiarna,’ she informed him, ‘then the Treaty of Tír Na nÓg is dead and you and your brother, with your foolish notions of heroism and chivalry — for the sake of a traitor’s daughter, I might add — may have destroyed the Druids in our realm forever.’

  CHAPTER 66

  ‘God … what happened?’

  Ren had landed hard on his shoulder in the explosion. His ears were still ringing, his eyes blinded by dancing lights.

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  He pushed himself up unto his hands and knees, surprised it was Trása who’d answered him. ‘Trása? Where’s Hayley?’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  Worried by the realisation, Ren rubbed his eyes and looked around. They were in a stone circle, but it was nothing like the one in Dublin. That had been weathered away to almost nothing. This looked new and was engraved with characters he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked, pushing himself painfully to his feet. His palms and knees were raw, his shoulder aching and he could taste blood.

  ‘I don’t know, but we’re not in m
y realm,’ Trása announced with certainty as she sat up, rubbing the bump on her head. She was on the ground a few feet away, still wet and bedraggled from the rain of the other realm.

  Ren scanned the moonlit circle, with no way of telling where they were, other than that it was warmer here and was no longer raining. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I am still human,’ she said, holding out her hands in front of her, as if checking to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. She looked at him and shrugged. ‘Unless you thoughtfully decided to lift the curse on me as we stepped into the rift, then I’m still bound by it. In my realm, I would turn instantly back into an owl the moment I stepped through the rift, and I’d have to stay in that form until you or Darragh chose to free me.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and the bruise on her forehead slowly faded to nothing. ‘But I can still heal myself,’ she added. ‘It’s like we’re home … but not.’

  Ren turned a full circle, trying to figure out where he was. This stone circle didn’t look like the one in Dublin, nor the circle from which they’d left Darragh’s realm, in Drombeg. ‘I can feel the magic,’ he said.

  Ren could feel it in a way he’d never have expected to before the Comhroinn. He could feel the difference in the air, the difference in the way he perceived the world. It wasn’t just the difference between a world of trees and hand-drawn ploughs and a city blanketed in petrochemical fumes. It was something that resonated in his bones. He’d felt the same thing when he woke up in the shepherd’s hut in Darragh’s reality, but back then, without the benefit of what his twin brother knew, he hadn’t recognised it for what it was.

  Ren closed his eyes for a moment, trying to find Darragh’s memory of healing. It turned out not to be an instructive memory so much as a knowing. He just had to make it happen.

  Concentrating on his scraped knees first, Ren willed the pain away and the skin to heal. He was rewarded with exactly that. Opening his eyes, he looked down at the clear pink flesh showing through the wet denim of his torn jeans and grinned like an idiot. ‘Cool.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you find it entertaining,’ Trása said, climbing to her feet. ‘What happened to the rift?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘That explosion …’ she said, looking around with a frown. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

  ‘Could something have happened to Ciarán?’ he asked. He was the one who had supposedly been opening the rift. A sudden, awful thought occurred to him. ‘There were bullets flying around back there. Suppose one of them got through the rift?’

  Trása thought on that for a moment and then nodded. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘That might explain why the rift shut down like that,’ Ren said. ‘And why we’re apparently not in Kansas anymore, Toto.’

  ‘Are you saying we’ve been thrown into a completely different realm?’ she asked, looking at him oddly.

  ‘You tell me. You’re the one who jumps through realities and messes up people’s lives for a living.’

  Trása didn’t appear keen on committing to anything. ‘Do you have any idea where we are?’

  He looked at her askance. ‘Can’t you tell?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’

  ‘I can count the number of times Darragh and I have crossed realities on the fingers of one hand. You’re a rift runner. Don’t you have some way of knowing?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then how do you know where you’re going when you open a rift?’ he asked. ‘If there’s a gazillion realities out there, how do you know you’re jumping into the right one?’

  ‘That’s what the jewels are for,’ Trása said, squatting down to study the symbols on the nearest standing stone. In the bright clear moonlight, Ren could see they were shorter than the ones in Dublin, and the standing stones in Darragh’s realm. The circle itself was much larger, too.

  As Trása spoke of the jewels, Darragh’s memories filled in the details for Ren. The jewels were engraved with the symbol of each realm. He also realised now how Darragh had known where to look for him. His brother had received the information from the traitorous Vate, Amergin, on the old man’s deathbed.

  It all seemed to make sense now. From his own recollections, Ren remembered Darragh tossing something to Ciarán as they opened the rift one time.

  Well, that proved a spectacularly unsuccessful endeavour, given I’m standing here in this lost place with Marcroy’s spy, while my brother and the girl we’d hoped to rescue are missing …

  The jewel he had tossed to Ciarán was Amergin’s jewel — the same jewel the traitor had used to open the rift to send Ren into another world as a child — where Patrick Boyle just happened to be on set that day.

  Ren had a fleeting thought that there might have been something coincidental in that, but didn’t dwell on it. He had other, more immediate concerns. Like where was Darragh? And Sorcha? And Hayley?

  It was still dark, so he couldn’t tell much about where they were, other than inside a large stone circle surrounded by trees.

  ‘Darragh and Sorcha are still in my reality,’ he said, recalling Sorcha’s shouted instruction to come back for them. Why had she done that? Was Darragh injured when he jumped from the moving car? Ren wanted to go back right now and find out.

  ‘Almost certainly they’re still there,’ Trása agreed.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘That’s helpful,’ Trása remarked.

  ‘What happens if they get caught?’

  ‘Then we’ll have to go back and rescue them, won’t we?’ she said, cocking her head as she examined the strange symbols on the stones. ‘As worlds go, Rónán, yours isn’t that bad. I mean, even if they catch him and think he’s you, they’re not going to kill him, are they?’

  ‘No,’ Ren agreed, a little uncertainly. If Darragh tried to run from the cops, he could be shot, but Darragh should know that. As Ren now carried his brother’s knowledge of his reality, so Darragh carried knowledge of Ren’s. ‘Probably not … but still …’

  Trása rose to her feet and turned to look at him. ‘First we have to find out where we are, then we have to figure out how to get back to your reality, then we have to find your brother —’

  ‘And Sorcha,’ Ren reminded her.

  ‘If we must,’ she agreed with some reluctance. ‘And once we’ve done that, we have to find a way from your old world back to the one where you both belong, preferably before Lughnasadh, because that’s when the Druid Council is going to transfer the power to the new heirs.’

  Trása had summed up their predicament concisely. It wasn’t a very encouraging assessment.

  ‘So how long have we got?’

  She shrugged. ‘I dunno. A couple of weeks, maybe.’

  ‘No pressure, then.’

  ‘Hey,’ Trása said, frowning. ‘It wasn’t my bright idea to go rift running to save your little friend. I’m just trying to help.’

  ‘Ah, that’s right. You didn’t have anything to do with the fact that if they catch Darragh in my realm and think he’s me, they’re going to throw him in the slammer for twenty-five to life for murdering someone you killed, did you?’

  ‘And kidnapping someone you decided to kidnap,’ she reminded him. ‘This mess isn’t my fault, Rónán. If you’d just left well enough alone, Hayley would still be fine — blind, perhaps, but still fine — and you and your crazy brother would be doing what you’re supposed to do, which is being the Undivided and keeping the peace with the Tuatha Dé Danann. And for the record,’ she added, ‘Darragh isn’t going to be stuck in gaol. He’ll be dead. Just like you. Lughnasadh is only a couple of weeks away.’

  Ren couldn’t argue with that logic, so he turned from Trása and bent down to look at the strange symbols on the nearest stone. There was no sign of the triskalion or any other recognisable Celtic symbol.

  He did recognise them, however. ‘This looks Japanese,’ he said pointing to the nearest stone.

  Trása stared at it for a moment and then shook her hea
d. ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s impossible?’

  ‘Well … no … It’s just the Youkai … they don’t have the ability to open rifts.’

  ‘Apparently, in this world, they do. Who are the Youkai, anyway?’

  Trása turned in a circle, studying the carved symbols with a very puzzled expression. ‘I suppose you could call them the Japanese Tuatha Dé Danann.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Ren said. ‘Ninja Faeries. I wonder if they’re as much fun to deal with as your lot?’

  She turned on him angrily. ‘For your information —’

  Trása’s words were cut short by an arrow slicing the space between them. It shattered on the stone behind them, leaving a black-fletched stub and a scattering of splinters on the ground at their feet.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Ren exclaimed. He grabbed Trása and pushed her to the ground as another arrow speared through the space where his head had been only moments before, this time sailing over the stones to thunk solidly into a nearby tree. He landed almost on top of Trása.

  ‘I guess that answers the question about ninja Faeries,’ he hissed, daring a look around, but he could see nothing in the dark.

  ‘You don’t know it’s the Youkai shooting at us,’ Trása said in low voice. ‘Can you tell where it’s coming from?’

  ‘Over there,’ Ren whispered, pointing to the right. ‘If I —’

  ‘There are horses coming,’ she warned, as she lay stretched out flat on the ground.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Feel the ground.’

  Ren placed his ear against the singed dirt of the stone circle. Sure enough, he could feel the ground vibrating with the approach of oncoming horsemen. And they were moving fast. Even he could tell that.

  ‘How many?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Who cares?’ she snapped back in a whisper. ‘One is too many!’

  ‘We have to get out of here.’

  ‘And go where?’ she asked.

  ‘That way,’ he said, for no other reason than there seemed to be slightly more trees in that direction, which meant slightly more cover. ‘Come on!’ He scrambled to his feet, wishing it were a cloudy night. The moon was shining like a stadium light.