Reunion

by Jennifer Fallon

  Will you be our mother now?

  Teagan wiped her mouth and looked up, wondering who had spoken. "What?"

  Will you be our mother now?

  You won't try to hurt us, will you?

  "Oh, my God," Teagan muttered, putting her hands over her ears. It's the babies. How can it be the babies?

  Teagan turned for the door, but it slammed shut before she could take a step.

  Don't leave us. Come back to us. Be our mother. We're hungry.

  "How ... how can you ..." she couldn't finish the sentence. The idea that these babies, barely a day old, were inside her head, that they were ...

  That they are killers, she realized.

  Teagan glanced down at her jeans and realized what the blood was.

  Or rather who it had been. She felt her knees go weak and her stomach clenched again, but she fought back the nausea. If they were in her head, did they know what she was thinking?

  You'll be good to us, won't you, mama?

  I'm not your mama.

  Our mama tried to hurt us. You won't try to hurt us, will you?

  Teagan wanted to walk to the door. She tried to think about walking, running, even crawling toward the door, but for some reason her legs wouldn't obey her. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. She didn't know if she was rooted to the spot out of fear or because of something the babies were doing to her. She just knew she wanted out of there and that she couldn't move a muscle ...

  And then the door opened and she cried out with relief as Ana stepped into the room and took in the nightmarish scene before her.

  The old nurse frowned but didn't otherwise react. "Where is Brydie?"

  Teagan raised her hands, although she wasn't sure why. It was part shrug, part "look around you". She didn't have the words to answer Ana coherently. The same torpor robbing her of the ability to flee this room seemed to have also paralysed her tongue.

  "Are the babies all right?"

  "They're ... fine ..." she managed to squeeze out.

  It was hard to know what Ana was thinking. Teagan closed her eyes, trying to block out the horror she had witnessed.

  And the knowledge of who had perpetrated it.

  Ana loves us.

  Maybe Ana could be our mother.

  Our mother tried to end us.

  Will you try to end us, Teagan?

  We're hungry.

  Teagan's eyes flew open. It was worse with them closed.

  "What happened?"

  "I ... She ..."

  "Out with it, girl," Ana snapped.

  "Brydie had a pillow ... she tried to ..."

  "Oh dear lord," Ana said pushing past Teagan to get to the cradle. She leaned over it and began to fuss over the babies. The voices quieted a little in Teagan's head as they vented their anger to Ana, telling her about their evil mother who had come in here and tried to suffocate them.

  And apparently about how Teagan had tried to intervene.

  Teagan found she could move again. She took a cautious step through the blood on the floor, and then another, and another. She was almost to the door before Ana stopped her.

  "Teagan!"

  She turned slowly, afraid to look, afraid not to.

  "You did well."

  "I ... I didn't know what else to do. She tried ..." Teagan pointed to the cradle and shrugged. "They're just babies ..."

  Babies who can explode people with a thought, a dangerous voice in her head reminded her, but she quashed the traitorous thought ruthlessly. Teagan had seen what these babies would do if they were threatened. Thoughts like that would have her splattered over the walls beside Brydie, if they caught a hint of it.

  Fortunately, the twins seemed to be focused on Ana. For the time being, Teagan was safe.

  "I want you to fetch Mother for me," Ana said. "She will want to know what's happened."

  "Okay."

  "She's in the dining room entertaining some guests. Don't let them see you like that. Just ask Mother to come here."

  Teagan glanced down and realized she was soaked to the skin.

  "Go now, Teagan," Ana ordered. "There's a good girl."

  Teagan looked up, still dazed, still not sure if what she thought she'd seen had really happened or if she was having some sort of hyper-real nightmare.

  "Will you ...?"

  "I'll be fine with my girls," Ana assured her. "You run along and fetch Mother."

  She nodded and did as Ana ordered because it required no thought and right now, her thoughts might get her killed too, if she allowed them to escape.

  * * *

  Teagan headed downstairs, first at a slow stumbling pace which gradually picked up until by the time she reached the formal downstairs dining room she was running. She couldn't really pinpoint what she was running from: whether it was from the horror she had just witnessed, or the voices she could still hear faintly in her head as they scolded Ana for leaving them alone with someone intent on doing them harm.

  It was a very one-sided conversation. Teagan didn't know what Ana was saying to the babies to calm them down. Or indeed if she was calming them at all. Her answers might be antagonizing the girls.

  If Ana answers the wrong way, will they kill her too, or do they just disintegrate people trying to smother them?

  Teagan stopped when she reached the dining room, a little surprised she'd managed to get from the nursery down to the ground floor without running into anybody else. Down the hall to her right was the reception area, where the staff who worked the hotel side of the Matrarchaí's operation would be getting ready to change shifts, she supposed. Off to her left were the kitchens, but she couldn't smell any enticing aromas of cooking over the stench of the fresh blood in which she was drenched.

  Taking a deep breath, Teagan turned and knocked on the thick oak door. She waited a moment, wondering if Ana had been wrong and Mother wasn't here at all.

  And then the door opened. Mother was dressed in a gorgeous, long red evening dress and was wearing her ruby necklace. Whoever her guests were, they were obviously important.

  "Teagan?"

  "Mother ... I ..."

  "Dear God, is that blood?" she asked in a low voice.

  Teagan nodded. "The babies ... Ana said ..."

  "Are they hurt? Is that their blood?"

  She shook her head. "It's Brydie."

  "Brydie's blood?"

  "No ... I mean it's Brydie."

  Mother stared at her for a moment before saying anything. When she did speak, she was all business.

  Why am I the only one here who thinks this is horrific?

  "This is marvellous news."

  "Excuse me?"

  Mother smiled at her. "Don't you realize what this means?"

  She shook her head. "Not really."

  "The babies can wield magic in a realm that only has what's left in the Enchanted Sphere. With them, we can finally achieve Partition." When Teagan didn't light up with happiness at the prospect, Mother sighed. "I need to see to my guests. Go to your room. Have a shower. And say nothing to anybody. Do you understand?"

  "I understand."

  Mother closed the door on her. A few minutes later - presumably after making her excuses to her important guests - she emerged from the dining room, hurrying past Teagan without even noticing that she was still there.

  Teagan leaned against the wall, tears welling in her eyes again, although she wasn't sure why she was crying. It might be for Brydie. It might be from fear.

  Or her tears might be for hopelessly wishing they'd never taken her from her own realm.

  Whatever the reason, she crumpled against the wall and sank to the floor, unable to stop her tears. She pulled her knees up, folded her arms across them and wept for the horror she had just witnessed and the dread realization that with the arrival of Hope and Calamity, her world was probably going to end.

  The Matrarchaí had their tool to force Partition and it was more than they had even imagined.

  Unless Isleen found her way to this
realm before Partition, her twin would die when all the realms collapsed in upon each other.

  And that was unfortunate, because she and Isleen were Empress Twins. Like Renkavana and his brother they were psychically linked. When one died, the other would soon follow.

  Partition for Teagan wasn't going to be something to celebrate.

  It would condemn her to death.

  Chapter 54

  "Do you hear that?" Darragh asked as he turned from the window. It was raining outside now - not a gently pleasant rain, but a savage storm that lashed at the windows and streaked the night with lightning. It was more than an hour since Marie-Claire had left them here. Their meal - a remarkably good filet mignon - had been silently delivered and devoured ages ago. Now they were just waiting. Darragh couldn't decide what they were waiting for.

  Ren didn't even look up from staring at the knife in the glass case on the mantel. He seemed fascinated by it. He'd been studying the etchings on the blade for the past fifteen minutes like they held the meaning of life. "Hear what?"

  "I thought I heard voices."

  "Maybe this place is haunted."

  "There's no such thing as ghosts."

  "Really?" Rónán asked, glancing over his shoulder. "And yet there are all manner of other supernatural creatures. You'd think ghosts would be as real as Faeries."

  Darragh smiled. Despite being stranded in this realm, despite being on the run and a prisoner of the Matrarchaí, it was good to be reunited with his brother. "The purists among the Tuatha Dé Danann claim there is nothing super-natural about the sídhe at all. They claim the Faerie are the only truly natural creatures. Humans, with their base appetites, greed, and voracious need to change the world about them, are the ones that don't belong in the natural world."

  "Spoken like a true Tuatha Dé Danann," Rónán said. "What do you suppose is keeping Marie-Claire?"

  "Who knows? Did you try the windows?"

  Rónán nodded. "They're locked. So is the door."

  "We could break a window. We're on the ground floor here and those dining chairs look pretty solid."

  "They're alarmed." Then he added with a thin smile, "The windows, I mean. Not the chairs."

  "We might make it to the road before they catch us," he said. "I'm game if you are."

  "And what will we do when we get to the road? Flag down a passing car and tell them we were kidnapped by a bunch of evil women from another reality, who made us dress in tuxedos and forced us to eat filet mignon?"

  Darragh smiled. "It's true. Even if it does sound ridiculous."

  "It doesn't matter anyway. Even if we get away from here, even if we found someone who believed such a ludicrous story, your face... and mine, by definition, have been plastered over every news channel in Europe for days by now." He turned from the mantel to look at Darragh. "We step foot outside this place, we're done for. Much as it pains me to admit it, the Matrarchaí are our best chance of getting out of this realm. They have access to stone circles located in the Enchanted Sphere, they are -"

  "Whoa! Back up a bit," Darragh said, wondering if he'd heard right. "The enchanted what?"

  "The Enchanted Sphere," Rónán explained. "What little magic is left in this realm settles in a band that circles the planet around the height of a hundred-storey building. You can open a rift from there and come and go as you please, although for some reason, they work better in large cities. Something about the life-force a large concentration of people gives off."

  Darragh was stunned. He'd never heard of such a thing. "How is it our rift runners know nothing of this Enchanted Sphere?"

  "I'm guessing it's because the few who do venture into magic-less realms don't hang about long enough to go visiting ultra high-rise buildings so they can discover it for themselves."

  The implications of such a discovery were astounding. Thousands of years of rift-running and no-one Darragh had ever spoken to had mentioned such a thing. It explained so much.

  It explained how the Matrarchaí had been able to grow so large and so powerful without the sídhe knowing anything about them until it was too late. "My God ... That's how they did it. It's how they've stayed under the radar for so long. We never heard of the Matrarchaí - except as a fairly benign sisterhood of midwives - because they did their plotting out of the reach of the sídhe. Why are you smiling like that?"

  "You said they'd stayed under the 'radar'. Last time I saw you, you didn't even know what radar was."

  "I've learned a lot since I was stranded here," Darragh told him, deciding they might as well have this long overdue discussion. "Much of it I will spend the rest of my life trying to unlearn."

  "I am sorry," Rónán said, thrusting his hands into his pockets. "I really am. If I'd known ..."

  "It's okay, Rónán. I understand."

  Rónán shook his head. "I'm not sure you do. Not entirely."

  "Explain it to me then."

  His brother seemed extraordinarily uncomfortable with the topic of Darragh being stranded in this realm. Every time Darragh broached the subject, Rónán found a way to steer the conversation away from it. Darragh believed Rónán had his reasons. He was prepared to be sympathetic to them. He didn't even blame his twin, confident he would have come for him as soon as he was able. But knowing why was important too. He'd put the past decade behind him happily, if he understood Rónán's motives.

  But Rónán was still hedging. "I'd rather wait until we can share the Comhroinn. Telling you why might not be enough. You need to understand it, too."

  "Don't you trust me to understand?"

  Rónán hesitated and then shrugged. "I'm not sure. I used to think you'd be fine with it. Then I discovered you were in prison here for the past ten years - and Portlaoise at that - and my grand idea didn't seem such so brilliant any longer."

  "Why don't you let me be the judge of what's brilliant and what isn't?"

  Rónán looked at him, perhaps debating how much of his reasoning to tell his brother, and then he took a deep breath and said, "How often have you had The Nightmare since you got stuck here?"

  The question took Darragh by surprise. He wasn't expecting Rónán's explanation to have anything to do with his nightmares.

  "Once or twice," he said. "Not for years though. Not until recently."

  "That's because I found a way to stop them."

  "So it was a true dream, then?" Darragh didn't need to ask that. Not really. He knew the taste, the feel of a dream that was prophecy, rather than wishful thinking.

  Rónán nodded. "The children are yours. The babies. They get younger every time I see them."

  "Then we're safe," he reminded his brother. "Is that why you left me in prison? So I would be denied a female who might bear my children?"

  "I didn't know you were in prison. And that's the problem. You'd planted your seed before you left our realm."

  Darragh frowned. "Who ... Brydie?"

  Brydie ... Brydie ... Darragh thought he heard someone calling her name. Rónán nodded.

  Well ... that explains a few things. "That's how you knew her name when I couldn't recall it."

  "Yes."

  Brydie was our mama. Mama tried to hurt us ... mama tried to hurt her babies.

  Darragh shook his head to clear the imaginary voices from it and focused on Rónán. His reasons seemed rather far-fetched, given the timing. "But her children must be half-grown by now. If the babies are getting younger in your dreams, she can't be their mother."

  Rónán's expression was bleak. "Brydie was trapped by a djinni in a jewel given to her by Marcroy. I found the jewel and I kept it."

  Darragh let that sink in for a moment, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Brydie to be trapped like that for a decade or more. "Do you still have it?"

  "Yes ... and no. I left it with someone before I came here. I was afraid stepping into this realm would break the enchantment, like it did with Trása when Marcroy turned her into a bird."

  Papa can protect us ... come to us, papa
... we love you ...

  "Did you hear that?"

  "Hear what?"

  Darragh was certain he was hearing things. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, trying to take in what Rónán was telling him. "So all this time ..."

  "Brydie has been pregnant with your children. The children in the dream."

  Come, papa ... we need you .... The lights flickered again. That storm was really getting savage out there.

  "And Trása? Have you seen her?"

  Rónán took a moment to answer, which was odd. "She's been in the ninja reality with me."

  There was something in the way Rónán phrased his explanation, something about the way he said "with me" that caused Darragh a momentary surge of jealousy. Although his youthful romance with Trása had ended when they were both still too young and innocent for it to be anything more than a few meaningful looks and stolen kisses, he knew without having to think about it that Trása was now a woman, and if she had spent the last decade with his brother they could only be enemies or lovers. There was no chance of anything in between.

  Rónán wasn't speaking of her like she was an enemy.

  But the admission made Darragh uneasy. It was the first time he'd caught his brother in a lie. When he'd suggested earlier that Brydie might look like an old woman, be married to a border lord and have half-dozen children by now, Rónán had answered "probably", when he'd known of her fate all along.

  Before Darragh could call him out on the lie, however, the lights dimmed again and then flickered back on. He glanced up at the crystal chandelier, waiting to see if the power would cut out completely, but then the light steadied and returned to normal.

  Papa ... papa ...

  "Must be the storm," Rónán remarked.

  "I suppose." It wasn't what he wanted to say, but the banal reply gave him time to gather his thoughts and push away the absurd voices in his head so he could decide how he should react to this new information. First Rónán had lied about Brydie, and now he'd all but admitted he and Trása were together. A part of Darragh felt betrayed, and more than a little suspicious. Were Rónán's motives for abandoning him in this realm so noble, after all, or had he committed an act of unconscionable cowardice? Did Rónán really want to defy destiny, or had he decided it would be easier to leave his brother to rot so he could have Trása for himself, while holding onto Brydie in her enchanted jewel and ensuring his brother's children could never rise up and force him to face his responsibilities?