Reunion

by Jennifer Fallon

  Another gust of chilly wind rustled the trees surrounding the old stone circle, There was no point hanging about here. She knew that. It just made her feel worse. Just intensified her anger.

  What had that Gardaí doctor said to her? You'll do better if you can confront what's happened to you and deal with it.

  "I'd love to confront it," she said aloud to the darkness. "Where are you, Ren?"

  In response to her challenge the stone circle began to crackle with lightning.

  Hayley looked about her in a panic and then dived into the bushes outside the circle to save herself from being fried by the lightning. Her pulse racing, she crouched down behind the tallest of the stones, which was barely large enough to offer concealment, and waited for the rift to resolve into an opening between worlds, before she peeked over the top to see who was coming through the rift.

  She expected Ren. Her heart was galloping at the thought of seeing him again; at the thought of a chance to even the score. Here was her chance make him take back what he'd done or take her back so she wouldn't be left with this awkward half-life she seemed to have in this reality, where nobody knew what to do with her, and the only person who understood what she'd been through was a ditzy, self-obsessed actress whose word was doubtful at the best of times.

  It was dark inside the rift and the angle she was watching from at the side of the circle didn't enable her to see through to the other side. For a fleeting moment, Hayley contemplated jumping up and taking a running dive through the rift, letting fate take her where it would.

  She never got the chance.

  Almost as soon as the rift stabilized, a woman came through, followed by a screeching owl who dropped like a stone as soon as it appeared. The bird landed heavily on the stones and was replaced almost instantly by another woman, naked and shivering, who immediately began to vomit violently. On their heels was a creature who seemed to be a very short fat ninja and following him came an insect-like creature that flitted about almost too quickly to see, which Hayley thought must be a pixie. She'd seen a few of them in Tír Na nÓg. She never expected to see one in this realm.

  As soon as they were through, the woman wearing the long cloak clutched at something tied around the neck of the naked woman who had so recently been a bird. Ignoring the vomiting, she turned and closed the rift with a wave of her other hand, while muttering something under her breath that Hayley couldn't make out.

  The little pixie seemed distraught. She couldn't ignore the vomiting woman, even if the human woman could. "Is she dying? Is she dying? Is she dying?" she kept asking, flapping about in a panic.

  "Echo! Stop that!" the woman in the cloak ordered. "She'll be fine. Go find Pete!"

  "Go find Pete! Go find Pete! Go find Pete!" the little pixie chanted and then winked out of existence.

  With the pixie taken care of, the woman turned and seemed to notice the little ninja for the first time. "What are you messing about with there?"

  "Nothing!" he said, hiding his hand behind his back.

  It's a Leipreachán, Hayley realized, but she wasn't sure if the women, the pixie and the Leipreachán were from the reality she'd come back from. There were plenty of pixies, but no ninja-Leipreachán there that she had seen.

  "Then come here," the woman ordered impatiently. "We need your help."

  "What do ye be expecting me to do?"

  "We need money," the naked vomiting girl gasped. "I need clothes. Go steal us some cash."

  "As ye wish," the Leipreachán said, turning away. He stared down at something in his hand, clearly not wanting to risk his treasure in this unknown realm. He looked about for a moment and then stashed whatever it was at the base of one of the worn-down standing stones not far from where Hayley was hiding. After kicking some dirt and leaves over his hidden treasure he vanished right before Hayley's eyes. The woman wearing clothes didn't seem the least bit surprised. She removed her cloak and wrapped it around the trembling shoulders of the other woman.

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Like death. Gods ... what did you give me, Nika?"

  "It doesn't matter. You survived and we are out of our enemy's reach. Echo will find Pete. We'll be safe soon."

  The younger woman nodded and looked about, as if seeing the world for the first time. Hayley ducked down behind the stone.

  "We're at the golf club, aren't we?" she heard the woman with the long blonde hair who'd been vomiting say.

  "I don't know. What is a golf club?"

  "I'll explain later." The young woman sounded recovered somewhat and had obviously been here before if she knew where she was. Hayley desperately wanted to look up and see if she recognized anybody, but she was too afraid of being caught. The time for stepping forward was as they arrived. She would just appear to be spying on them, if she revealed herself now.

  "We should head for the clubhouse. I'm pretty sure we can find somewhere to hunker down until we locate the others."

  "But you have no clothes on," the older one said.

  There was a smile in the younger woman's voice as she replied, "Worked the last time I was here, Nika."

  Hayley stayed hidden as they moved away, pushing through the undergrowth toward the clubhouse and civilization. Still no wiser about the identity of the women, she waited until she could no longer hear them and then scrambled over to the stone where the Leipreachán had stashed whatever it was he was hiding.

  If these women didn't know Ren, they at least knew how to come and go through this realm as they pleased. Whatever the Leipreachán had stashed behind the stones, he would want to come back for it. There was a good chance, she'd be able to barter for its return, either for information or, if it came to it, passage through the rift to another realm.

  It wasn't hard to find. The Leipreachán hadn't hidden it very well at all, perhaps relying on the remoteness of this place to keep it safe. When she unearthed the treasure, she gasped. It proved to be a beautiful, polished amethyst the size of a pigeon egg. She dusted off the leaves and rubbed the dirt from its surface on the leg of her jeans. As she did, it seemed the color drained from the jewel.

  And then she looked up to discover a very startled young woman in a long linen gown staring at her with a look of utter astonishment on her face.

  "Danú!" the young woman breathed, looking about in wonder. "Tá mé saor!"

  I am free, Hayley automatically translated. Hayley didn't know what to say. She stared down at the jewel and then at the girl who had just appeared in front of her and realized what had happened. "Oh my God, you were trapped in this thing?"

  The girl stared at her, not understanding English. Hayley repeated the question in the Gaelish dialect she'd picked up in the other realm, thanks to the magical intervention of a druid.

  The woman in the linen nightgown nodded and replied in the same language. "You have rescued me. I am Brydie Ni'Seanan and I owe you my life."

  "Anytime," Hayley said, more than a little bemused. "I'm Hayley. How did you -"

  Her question was cut off by Brydie's scream. She doubled over, clutching her belly. Then the girl dropped to her knees, crying out in agony.

  "What's wrong?"

  "The ... the ... pain ..." Brydie cried, falling onto her side. She had pulled her knees up and crossed her arms over her abdomen, but it didn't seem to be doing a thing to help. She screamed even louder, the sound echoing across the golf course. It was then that Hayley noticed her belly seemed to be growing of its own accord at a speed that defied logic.

  And it was tearing her insides apart.

  This was magic, Hayley knew ... or the result of it. This girl had come through a rift from another reality trapped in a jewel.

  She needed help, but not the sort of help this world offered.

  It took Hayley a split second to make her choice. Calling an ambulance would mean involving the Gardaí and a lot of questions she'd been very careful not to answer. Calling Kerry meant admitting she'd been back here, looking for a way out.

  Calling
Kiva ... well, Kiva was pretty useless in day-to-day life. She'd be no help at all in a crisis. Even she would be the first to admit that.

  "Hang on," Hayley said, fishing her phone and the rather battered business card Kiva had given her out of her pocket. Brydie needed someone who knew what was going on. The young woman was sobbing with the pain and a dark red stain had appeared on the linen nightgown from between her legs.

  Hayley dialed the number on the card and was relieved when it was picked up on the second ring. "Hello?"

  "You don't know me. My name is Hayley Boyle. Kiva Kavanaugh gave me this number. I'm at the Castle Golf Club. I'm with a girl called Brydie who just came through a rift from another reality and she's in trouble. Serious trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?" the woman on the other end of the line asked after a long silence. She sounded foreign. French, perhaps. Maybe Belgian.

  "I don't know for certain," Hayley said, "but it looks like she's having a baby."

  This time there was no hesitation. "You did right to call me, Hayley. Wait there. I will have help to you in a matter of minutes."

  The line went dead. Hayley pocketed her phone and knelt down beside Brydie. When she'd emerged from the jewel, Hayley could have sworn Brydie's belly was flat. Now it was swollen and distended as if she was nine-months pregnant.

  Brydie was crying with the pain.

  "Hang in there, Brydie," she said in Gaelish, unzipping her jacket and slipping it off to cover the distressed young woman and keep her warm. "I called someone. Help is on the way."

  "Who ... did you ... call?"

  "The Matrarchaí."

  Brydie shook her head. "No ... you shouldn't have."

  Before Hayley could defend her decision, she heard the distinctive whumpa-whumpa-whumpa of a helicopter approaching.

  Wow, that was fast.

  She supposed that for an organization which could manufacture lives and histories for people like Kerry and Kiva, a medivac helicopter on standby was probably hardly any effort at all.

  A few moments later the clearing was lit by a bright light from overhead, and then it moved off them and onto the fairway as the helo landed gently in the open space beyond the rough. It was only a minute or two later before paramedics were swarming around Brydie, lifting her - still screaming - onto a stretcher and rushing her out of the stone circle to the waiting helicopter.

  Hayley stood back, feeling quite useless. As they hurried away, an elegantly-dressed woman with dark hair approached her. She wore a grey business suit and had the sleek, confident air of the sort of woman who could produce a helicopter and a team of paramedics in a matter of minutes. She reminded Hayley of Eunice Ravenel, Kiva's lawyer, who was always bailing Ren out of trouble.

  "You are Hayley Boyle?" she asked, in that slightly foreign accent.

  She nodded.

  "You may call me Mother," the woman said with a friendly smile, offering Hayley her hand. "You are Kerry's stepdaughter, yes? The one who has been missing all these years?"

  Hayley nodded again. This woman seemed to know it all.

  Mother seemed very pleased. "Have you ever ridden in a helicopter, Hayley?"

  "Once. With Kiva."

  "Then let us make it twice," she said, holding out her arm. "We have much to discuss, you and I, young Hayley Boyle. And there are some young friends of mine I think you're very much going to enjoy meeting."

  Chapter 39

  Teagan was woken by the sound of a helicopter landing on the lawn.

  She climbed out of bed and walked to the window, looking down over the vast grounds of the Cambria Castle estate, wondering who was arriving at this hour. Mysterious late-night comings and goings were not uncommon here and they rarely affected her, but Teagan was curious nonetheless.

  This arrival seemed to be some sort of medical emergency. Someone on a stretcher was hurried from the helo as the blades slowed to a stop and the floodlights that lit the helo pad shut off. In the last glimmer of their light before they faded completely, she spied Mother emerging from the helo with a girl dressed in jeans and one of those warm, puffy jackets they made in this realm that seemed too light to offer any real warmth and yet were as toasty as a big heavy fur. Teagan had a similar jacket hanging in her closet.

  I wonder if this new girl is like me? Wide-eyed, innocent ... and gullible.

  The promise of Teagan's first meeting with Mother had never really been fulfilled. She had promised to unlock Lady Delphine's memories in her mind.

  "All in good time, cherie," she'd said. "First, you have to do something for me."

  "What do you want?" Teagan had asked.

  "Everything you know about the man who killed my sister," Mother said in a quiet voice that even now, when she thought of it, chilled Teagan to her core. "When I come back you can tell me what you know, and if you're a really good girl I might even let you help me avenge her."

  Teagan told them everything she knew and had been waiting for the opportunity, for seven years now, to help Mother avenge her sister and it still hadn't happened.

  Mother might want vengeance, but it seemed she was more interested in politics.

  The Matrarchaí, which had once seemed so mysterious and exciting to Teagan, proved to be somewhat less romantic in practice. They had a mission - dear gods, she was so sick of hearing about the mission - and everyone had a part to play.

  Teagan had come here believing she was an integral part of that mission. Her reality had been chosen by the Matrarchaí, after all. She had been chosen by the Matrarchaí. Her father came from a bloodline of Undivided that the Matrarchaí had carefully nurtured over centuries. Teagan and Isleen were seven years old when they stood by Delphine's side as she and the Konketsu drove the last of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the greater Youkai from their realm, leaving only the hidden lesser Youkai to mop up as they found them. Delphine had rewarded her and her sister with the Comhroinn, but fearing they were too young to deal with the information she had shared, she'd blocked it with a promise to return when they were older and remove the barriers.

  That never happened, of course. Renkavana arrived with Trása and messed everything up.

  Her first few months in this realm had been exciting beyond words. This reality without magic had so many interesting things, such intriguing ways of doing things, that for a long while she didn't miss the magic at all. It was all well and good to be able to light a lamp with a thought or toss an underling across the room with a wave of your arm if they displeased you, but here they could record music and play it back over and over so the beauty of it was never lost. They had television and movie theatres that showed fabulous stories in 3D. They could fly thousands of people from one end of the planet to the other. They had visited the moon.

  All this had come at the cost of the magic, of course. Technology and magic could not coexist; or so Teagan had believed before she came here and she'd clung to that belief for a long time after she arrived.

  Until she learned of "the mission'.

  Until she began to fully appreciate what the mission was planning to achieve.

  Her role, she learned from Mother, was to ensure that her reality, along with as many other realities as possible touching this one, was filled with magic not hampered by Faerie who might object - or worse, have the power to stop - the Matrarchaí achieving Partition. To a large extent, Delphine achieved that aim in Teagan's realm before she had been killed and Teagan and Isleen had been expected to carry on her work by eradicating the lesser Youkai. When the time came, the magic from their world, and the thousands of others like it, would spill into this world and replenish its magic before it was severed from the others, leaving this reality with the best of both worlds - fabulous technology, and magic to boot.

  There was a catch, Teagan soon learned, which made the Matrarchaí's mission more urgent, and perhaps explained why Mother was prepared to put aside her dreams of vengeance for the furtherance of the mission. The technology that made this world so special was eating it alive:
the climate was warming at an alarming rate as a direct result of the development of all this fabulous gadgetry, and along with the ability to make beautiful music over and over, they'd developed weapons so powerful they could make this planet uninhabitable.

  The Matrarchaí, who'd been content to let this world muddle along as it would until recently, were starting to worry that if they didn't force Partition soon it would be beyond redemption. The politics here, where they had chosen to make their headquarters, were becoming so volatile they feared the end was just around the corner. Thousands upon thousands of years ago when the Tuatha Dé Danann occupied Europe, the Youkai were spread out across what was now called Japan, the Dreamtime ruled Gondwanaland, the Pristine Ones watched over China, and the hero twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué - the first Undivided of this realm - ruled the Americas in remarkable harmony with Chaac, Kukulkan, and K'iche' ... the Mayan god responsible for liaison between the magical realm and the mundane one.

  They were gone now, victims of the march of progress in this realm. But the Matrarchaí had not forgotten any of them and they had grand plans for this world's redemption, too. There was a void left by the gods. It was partly filled by this world's countless religions where they worshipped imaginary gods, who could never answer their prayers. In a post-Partition reality, the Matrarchaí would be the only ones capable of wielding the magic that would flood into this realm.

  They would be the gods again.

  They would bring peace.

  They would bring harmony.

  They would end the threat of starvation, poverty ... even global warming. SO they claimed.

  It was only recently that Teagan realized that the process of Partition would devastate this world. Peace, harmony and an end to poverty and starvation would be in no small way achieved by the fact that several billion people would die as it happened.

  This realm was rich in resources, she had heard Mother explaining to one of her minions. The problem was with the number of people trying to share them.