Reunion

by Jennifer Fallon

  "I'm sorry, Teagan. I don't know where she is," Brydie explained.

  "She'd know the way here," Teagan said. "When Mother finally unlocked the memories in my mind, I knew immediately how to get here through a rift. I even knew who to contact when I got here and how to do it. Do you suppose she came here?"

  "Surely they would have said something to you if your sister had arrived in this realm?" Brydie said.

  Teagan nodded. "Of course they would." She wished she felt as confident of that as she sounded.

  Before Brydie could ask anything further, the door opened and a smiling face appeared around the door. "Ah! There you are," the woman said. She was an older woman, with a round face and a warm smile, wearing a nurse's uniform. "Not interrupting anything important, am I?"

  "We were just talking," Teagan assured her. "Come in."

  "I just came to tell you the babies are ready when you are," the woman announced from the door. "A pair of fine wee babes they are, too. Take your time and don't strain anything. Teagan can show you the way."

  Brydie smiled, but it looked quite forced. "Be right there!"

  The door closed and Teagan turned, expecting to see Brydie throwing back the covers. But she hadn't moved. In fact, she looked quite pale.

  "Are you okay?"

  Brydie's eyes welled up with tears. "Can you keep a secret, Teagan?"

  "Sure."

  "I don't want the babies." She looked panic-stricken but almost relieved to admit such a thing out loud.

  Teagan wasn't sure what to say. She was barely twenty, hadn't even thought about having her own children yet, and Brydie looked no older than she was. Far from being shocked by her admission, she was actually quite sympathetic. "I understand, but maybe once you see them ..."

  Brydie wiped away her tears, and sniffed, as if she was angry at herself for being so emotional. "There's something not right with them, Teagan. I know it."

  "Ana just said they were fine."

  But Brydie was adamant. "They're not fine. They were caught in an enchanted jewel for ten years and went from nothing to being born in a matter of hours."

  "That's magic for you," Teagan said with a shrug.

  "But this realm has no magic, Teagan," she reminded her. "So tell me, how can that be?"

  Teagan had no answer for that.

  "Do you know, they didn't cry."

  "What?"

  "The babies. When they were born. Neither of them made a sound."

  "That might have been because of the drugs they gave you," Teagan suggested, uncomfortable with the whole discussion. What would she know about having babies?

  "It wasn't the drugs. There's something not right with them, Teagan."

  "Tell you what," she said, "why don't we go and see them? Then we can find out, one way or another."

  "Do you believe me?"

  Teagan thought about that for a moment before she shrugged. "I don't disbelieve you."

  "That's a start," Brydie said with a sigh. "Will you come with me?"

  "Sure," she said, "I like babies."

  "I wish I did," Brydie said.

  * * *

  The nursery was a short way up the hall in a room so well set up, Teagan figured there must be a lot of babies born here. It made sense, she supposed. Babies were the Matrarchaí's stock-in-trade. It shouldn't surprise her to find they were well equipped to cope with a couple of newborns.

  "Ah, there you are," the cheerful, tubby nurse overseeing the nursery pronounced as they opened the door. Teagan followed Brydie into the nursery and looked around with interest. It looked like any hospital nursery, with mobiles hanging from the ceiling, nursery rhyme characters painted on the walls and a couple of unoccupied neonatal humidicribs parked in the corner, obviously not needed for Brydie's babies.

  The babies were not in the clear plastic cribs hospitals favored, however. In the center of the room was a massive wooden cradle carved with elaborate Celtic knotwork, inlaid with softly glowing mother-of-pearl. Teagan studied the cradle with interest.

  "Solid oak, it is," the nurse informed them with a smile. "The wee babes should fit in there together for a while yet."

  "It's beautiful," Brydie said, looking a little bemused.

  "Aye, it is. That mother-of-pearl was brought up from the very depths of the ocean by the mara-warra. It was a gift from a faerie queen centuries ago, according to legend. It's rocked many a generation of twins to sleep since then, I don't doubt."

  "I thought we hated Faeries," Teagan said.

  "That we do, lassies," the nurse agreed, and then she turned to Brydie, "but it doesn't mean they can't turn out the odd craftsman when it suits them. My name is Ana, by the way. I'll be helping you with the bairns until you're properly on your feet again."

  "Er ... thank you," Brydie answered.

  "Have you given them names yet?"

  "Marie-Claire named them. Hope and Calamity."

  Ana said nothing for a fraction of a second and then she smiled. "Well, Mother knows what she's about. They're lovely names."

  Hope, maybe, Teagan thought. But Calamity ... really?

  "You can come closer," Ana said, as neither Teagan nor Brydie made any attempt to move further into the room. "They won't bite."

  Using the wheeled drip stand to support herself, Brydie took a step closer. Teagan couldn't believe how reluctant she was to see her children. Surely she was a little bit curious?

  "You'll be able to spend more time with them once the doctor's been to check on your stitches and you get that drip out. She's already rung to say she's on her way, so that should be sometime after dinner. Then we can bring them to you and you can try feeding them yourself. It's important for you to begin the bonding process."

  Teagan glanced at Brydie and realized that far from looking forward to having her babies with her, she was terrified by the idea. "I'll stay with you," she offered.

  Brydie shot her a grateful look and then turned to stare at the cradle. "It's very ... impressive."

  "An impressive cradle for some impressive babes," Ana said. She fussed over the cradle a little more, smoothing the mattress out and arranging the blankets, and then she stepped back and allowed them to come closer.

  A step behind Brydie, Teagan followed her toward the cradle. She heard Brydie gasp before she saw the babies for herself. Brydie covered her mouth with her hand as Teagan stepped up beside her, wondering at the horrified look on Brydie's face, and then she looked into the cradle and understood why.

  The babies weren't human.

  There were human-shaped and they looked the size of day-old babies, but they had distinctly pointed Faerie ears, a shock of dark hair and when one of them opened her mouth a little, she spied a mouthful of tiny, pointed teeth.

  "What ... what are they?" Brydie gasped.

  "The future," Ana replied.

  "I never gave birth to these ... monsters."

  "I'd not be saying that in their hearing," Ana warned. "Whatever you might think of the bairns, lass, they are your flesh and blood. You are their mother. You are required to love them."

  Brydie shook her head. Tears streamed down her cheeks. "They're not even human."

  "Of course they're not. What good would human babies be to us at this juncture?"

  Brydie didn't answer. Instead, she turned and struggled to flee the room, dragging the drip stand in her wake. Teagan stared down at the babies for a moment longer and then looked up at Ana, feeling the need to apologize for Brydie's odd behavior.

  "She'll come around."

  "She'd better," Ana said, rather ominously, and then she turned to attend to something over by the change table near the window.

  Tell her to come back. Teagan let out a yelp as the thought filled her mind and she realized it had come from one of the babies. They were both staring up at her with creepy, disconcerting, blue on blue eyes.

  "Did you say something, dear?"

  Teagan shook her head, transfixed by the babies in the cradle. Tell our mother to come bac
k.

  Teagan broke away from the glamouring effect of the babies' stare and fled the room almost as fast as Brydie had done, more frightened by those eyes and the tiny voices in her head than by anything she had ever before experienced in her entire life.

  Chapter 49

  Ren woke to the familiar, and unwelcome, Brionglóid Gorm headache. For a time he kept his eyes closed, knowing that the pain of forcing them open and facing the light would be intense. But then he heard someone groaning and remembered Darragh, and knew he was going to have to open his eyes eventually, and that without magic, the headache would take a long, long time to fade.

  He blinked painfully as he manoeuvred himself into a sitting position - no mean feat with his hands tied behind him - and discovered Darragh was lying opposite him on the floor of an empty room, just coming to. His face was powdered with the telltale blue dust of the Brionglóid Gorm. Ren supposed he must look the same.

  There were tall, diamond-paned windows on one wall with no curtains. Daylight streamed through the windows onto the polished floorboards, taking the chill off the air. Ren glanced around, trying to determine where they were, but other than high ceilings, cream walls and a boarded-up fireplace, there was nothing in this room that gave him any obvious hint as to where they were being held.

  The only thing he knew for certain was that they were still in a realm without magic and that Hayley had betrayed them.

  He should have known something was wrong when she appeared in the kitchen window of Kiva's house, waving and smiling. Hayley looked exactly the same as she had when he'd last seen her a decade ago. It made him feel old to realize she was still a child and he was a grown man, a decade full of dark and unwelcome memories creating an unbridgeable gulf between them.

  Hayley had let herself in and began chatting away as if there was nothing the least bit odd about Ren - who'd been missing for a decade - and Darragh, the escaped convict, having breakfast in Kiva's kitchen. In hindsight, he realized she wasn't chatting to them ... she was babbling. She asked how they were, what they'd been up to, but didn't draw breath long enough for them to get a word in, and kept up the conversation for so long Darragh had thrown him a look that Ren just knew meant: Seriously ... we gave up the last ten years of our lives for this girl.

  There had been a reason for Hayley's nervousness. She was stalling. Ren realized that too late. By then the Matrarchaí were at the door and someone was blowing Brionglóid Gorm in his face and then he woke up here, tied hand and foot, with no idea how he was going to get himself or his brother out of this predicament and back to their own realm.

  Not that their own realm was really the place for them, either. In their own realm the Hag was waiting for him to murder a couple of innocent children. Besides, the Druids believed he and Darragh were dead and would likely kill them if they turned up out of the blue, and destroyed everything they believed about magic by still being alive when they should have died ten years ago.

  "How's your head?"

  Darragh groaned in response, summing up exactly how Ren felt. He managed to get himself upright and looked about the room, frowning. "Any idea where we are?"

  Ren shook his head and instantly regretted the movement. "There's no magic. I'm pretty sure we're still in my old realm." He glanced around the room, wishing it would give him some hint as to where they were. "I'm guessing it's the Matrarchaí."

  He'd had time to explain some of what he know about the Matrarchaí to his brother, but not all of it.

  "How did they find us?"

  "Kiva told them. Maybe Kerry. Maybe we weren't as clever as we thought we were, hiding in Kiva's house."

  Darragh nodded slowly, obviously suffering from a headache similar to Ren's. "I have to admit, I did think hiding out in your mother's place was somewhat ... risky."

  Ren gave his brother a thin smile. "Nice of you to say risky, when I know you really want to say insane."

  "I've learned to be tactful, these past few years. It was something of a survival strategy in prison."

  Ren didn't want to think about what Darragh had suffered in prison. Particularly as it was his fault. Better to change the subject. They could talk about what Darragh had had to do to survive some other time. If they survived this latest calamity. "Why didn't they kill us, do you suppose?"

  "Do the Matrarchaí usually kill people? I thought you said they were only targeting the sídhe races."

  "We are sídhe."

  "We are Druid."

  "No, actually we're sídhe," Ren said, as he realized how much he needed to tell his brother. "Almost pure, believe it or not."

  Darragh shook his head with a grimace. "We look nothing like the sídhe."

  "Selective breeding. That's why the Matrarchaí are midwives, you know. They mix the right bloodlines and then they're on hand to smother any babe with a hint of sídhe features. Eventually, if you do that for long enough, you get almost pure sídhe that look human."

  Darragh was not convinced. "But our mother was a Druid. Our father was -"

  "Marcroy Tarth."

  "Was who?"

  "Marcroy Tarth. He's our father."

  "Did you hit your head when they knocked us out?"

  Ren smiled. "Don't worry. It took me a while to get my head around the idea, too."

  "But ... but ... are you serious? Marcroy? The same Marcroy ..."

  "The one and only."

  Darragh's disbelief might have been comical, had not the pain in Ren's head robbed him almost entirely of his sense of humor.

  "Does he know?"

  "Oh, yes. But I think he only found out recently and if it's any consolation, he's no happier about it than you are." Ren recalled Marcroy's haughty disdain, adding, "In fact, I think he's quite horrified by the notion. Of course, he doesn't realize we're not half-blood mongrels, we're almost all sídhe. Or that our mother, despite looking quite human and belonging to the Druids, was almost as Tuatha Dé Danann as he was."

  Darragh closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. "That's why we can wane. Why we survived the power transfer. We weren't ever really given any power. We had it all along. It was innate."

  "So when they branded the new heirs, we didn't lose anything."

  "God ... it's almost too much to take in. And yet it makes perfect sense. Who else knows what we are?"

  "Just about everyone in the ninja reality."

  "The what?"

  Ren smiled a little. It sounded quite ridiculous when he said it out loud. "It's the nickname we gave the reality where we were dumped after the rift collapsed on us. I told you about it last night."

  "You never mentioned anything about ninjas."

  Ren shrugged. "Don't know how it happened exactly, but the Japanese pretty much rule the world in that realm. The Leipreachán have taken to dressing like ninjas, hence -"

  "Ninja reality," Darragh finished for him. "I think I'd like to visit this ninja reality of yours, Rónán."

  "We'd be there right now except for, well, the whole abduction thing."

  "There is much you should have told me, I suspect," Darragh said, as if he knew Ren didn't know where to begin.

  "More than you'll ever know."

  "Give me the highlights, then," Darragh suggested. "We can fill in the details later."

  Ren nodded, wondering if he could summarise things any better than trying to explain it in full. "Okay ... how about this. The Matrarchaí have been plundering all the realities they can get control of. They decimate the sídhe, destroy their homes, make it impossible for them to stay. Sometimes they do it by deception, occasionally they do it with an all-out war. What they're aiming for, are worlds full of magic and no sídhe."

  "I'm not sure which question bothers me the most," Darragh admitted. "Why the Matrarchaí are doing this, or how you know so much about it. Do you know what they hope to achieve by ridding these realms of sídhe? It seems a bit extreme if all they want is not to share magic."

  "The Hag has a theory about that."

&
nbsp; Darragh sighed. "God, even if I could think straight from this headache, I can't imagine any reality where the Hag sits down for a chat with one of the Undivided."

  Before Ren could answer that, the door opened. They turned to find a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and what looked like a couple of dinner suits on coat hangers draped over her arm. She smiled at them, acting as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about two men bound hand and foot sitting on the floor of this large, empty room.

  "Ah," she said, "you're awake. Do you want something for your headache? I imagine you both feel like you've been hit by a truck."

  "Thanks," Darragh said, "but I'm not sure I'd trust anything the Matrarchaí served up in the guise of a headache cure."

  "Suit yourself," she said, walking over the mantel and the empty fireplace. She hung the two suits on the edge of it and turned to look at them. "I am going to untie you now. I realize your first instinct will be to try to overwhelm me and escape, so I have been asked to give you a message."

  "By whom?" Ren asked. Clearly this was not the woman in charge, just one of her minions, if she was being asked to deliver messages.

  "You'll find that out at dinner," she said.

  "What's the message?" Darragh asked.

  "I've been asked to remind you that all of Europe is on the lookout for you, the dangerous escaped prisoner who looks just like your brother, so neither of you is safe beyond these walls and we will do nothing to discourage your apprehension by the authorities of this realm if you choose to leave. You might decide escape is still worth the risk, so let us make the decision easier for you. If either of you attempts to escape, commit any act of violence, or do anything other than exactly what you are told to do, we will order Kiva Kavanaugh, Kerry and Patrick Boyle and your young friend, Hayley Boyle, killed within the hour." The woman smiled pleasantly. "How's that for an incentive to behave?"

  Darragh glanced at Ren and then back at the woman. There really wasn't much to say. "I give you our word as the Undivided that we will behave."

  "You've no need to give me your word, dear," she said, removing a small knife from the pocket of her cardigan. "Just trust that ours is exactly what we say it is. Oh, one other thing. We dress for dinner here."