Just Believe

by Manning

  At least that was her opinion before she heard the caller's voice.

  “Lucas? You'd better be pickin’ up that phone, boyo. Come on, now, pick up!”

  Deeper, richer, the accent a bit stronger, perhaps because of irritation? As seconds ticked by, the caller waited. Annabelle caught her breath, waiting with him, hoping he'd speak again.

  “All right, you want to play that game, do you? Fine. Lucas, this is your brother, Gaelen. I'm in my office. I just got a call to a convocation, and you're invited too, lad, if you can fit business into your busy social calendar. I have no idea what it's about, only Eochy said it was urgent. So, get your rear up there.”

  Gaelen hung up, leaving Annabelle to shake off a feeling of loss. It was ridiculous. She didn't even know the man. Just because he sounded sexy and handsome didn't mean he was.

  Still, such a voice couldn't be wasted on an unassuming man. It had to be just one piece of a total package. And quite a package it must be.

  “Oh, stop it,” she chided herself, leaning back in the recliner and drumming her fingers on the worn arms. “You have to concentrate on the other Riley brother.”

  Of course, to find Lucas Riley one might use his brother, she thought, the added bonus brightening the whole scenario.

  Peeking through the pile of bills and papers on the coffee table by the telephone, Annabelle searched for an address book or a telephone book. There was a university catalog. Erin said Gaelen Riley was a professor of Celtic Lit at the university, so he had to be listed. Annabelle thumbed through, quickly locating Riley among the language department members. His credentials were very impressive: B.A. in Linguistics from Rutgers, master's degree from Johns Hopkins, Ph.D. from Harvard, now a full professor at UNC.

  “Pretty tony background. Wonder if he's old money?”

  His office number was listed there, so she dialed.

  “Dr. Riley's office.”

  “Is Dr. Riley in?”

  “No, I'm sorry he isn't. May I ask who's calling?”

  Who? All her years in tabloid journalism hadn't been for nothing.

  “My name is Erin Tinker. I'm a...” Annabelle paused so the full effect of the word would hit Riley's secretary, “friend of his brother, Lucas.”

  “Oh, Erin! I didn't recognize your voice. It's Susie.”

  Uh-oh. What now?

  “Oh, Susie. Sure. I didn't recognize you either.” Annabelle decided to use the misunderstanding to her benefit. “Susie, I don't have a lot of time. Is Gaelen there? I need to talk to him about Lucas.”

  “Is something wrong?” Susie was a good friend if the concern in her voice was sincere. Annabelle almost felt guilty using her like this.

  “I'm not sure. I haven't seen him for a couple of days—we had a little fight.” Why not juice up the story a little? “I just wanted to make sure he was all right.”

  “Gee, I'm sorry. I haven't seen him since, I guess it was Monday.”

  Could it be coincidence Lucas hadn't been seen by a close friend since Monday, the same day of Erin's ill-fated date with him?

  “Erin?” Again Annabelle noted the concern in Susie's voice. A needle-sharp prick of envy pierced her heart. She didn't have a close friend who'd care what had happened to her. The only person she'd told about her trip to North Carolina had been her editor.

  “Erin?” Susie asked again. “Are you okay? What's happened?”

  Annabelle shook off her self-pity. “It's nothing, Susie. Can you tell me where Gaelen is?”

  “You just missed him. He got a call a few minutes ago and dashed out. He said he'd be back as soon as he could, but he didn't say where he was going. Didn't sound like he'd be gone long, though.”

  The mysterious convocation he'd mentioned in his message? Where was it? What was it?

  “You sure you're okay?”

  “Yeah, I'm sure. Don't worry. Thanks.”

  As Annabelle hung up the phone on Susie's next question, she hoped she hadn't ruined her sister's friendship with her deception.

  More urgent, though, she'd hit a dead end.

  For now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Of all the inconsiderate, arrogant, downright sassenach things to do!” His footsteps and angry words echoed off the stone walls, reverberating through the hand-hewn hallway descending beneath the New Jersey countryside.

  Gaelen didn't care. The Council had to know this was a bad time to call a convocation. His paper was due next week at the editorial offices of Celtic Review, and he still had exams to grade from last semester.

  “But we can't take the time to check people's calendars. Oh, no. Just—” He raised his hand and snapped his fingers in front of his face, “and we're supposed to come flyin'!”

  Rounding the corner, he headed for the chamber at the end of the corridor. The reddish glow from the doorway froze him for a moment, giving him a chill of uncertainty. Had he missed something in Eochy's terse summons? No matter. Gaelen swept his uneasiness aside. So the better acoustics in this section of the tunnel could warn Eochy and the others of his sour mood, Gaelen raised his voice. Let them know what to expect before he entered.

  “I've got a life, unlike some people!” he shouted toward the open door.

  “Hurry up, Gaelen,” came the reply from the chamber. “We've got lives, too, and they're wastin’ away waitin’ on you.”

  A rumble of male laughter and a few well thought-out curses accompanied Eochy's words.

  Gaelen's mood soured.

  It didn't get any better when he entered the Council chamber.

  His feet froze on the stone floor of the cave. His voice froze in his throat.

  The circular table, nearly forty feet across, a cross-section cut from a single tree—no one knew how long ago—occupied the middle of the chamber. Seated around the table were ninety-nine members of the Council of One Hundred.

  “Take your seat, Gaelen.”

  Though he heard the leader of the Council very clearly, Gaelen was still rooted to the spot where he'd stopped, staring until his eyes hurt.

  “Gaelen?” Eochy stood and came toward him with his bandy strut. “Why aren't you prepared?”

  “No one told me.”

  “You've lost track of time out there in the Otherworld. You should call home more often.” Eochy grabbed his elbow and pulled him to the only empty chair at the table. “Now, get ‘em out.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I'm not going to parade my private parts for the entire assembly,” Gaelen insisted.

  “We've all got ours out,” Eochy said.

  They did, indeed. Each and every person at the table had them out and the iridescence caught the light from the stones mounted in the smooth chiseled walls of the sidhe.

  “Gaelen, we can't begin the convocation until you get your wings out.”

  There, somebody said the W-word. Damn. Damn.

  “Look,” he pleaded, “I haven't had them out in years. They'll be all wrinkled and...”

  Eochy waved to the doorkeepers. Two strapping lads, selected for their brawn and lack of humor, came up behind Gaelen, each one taking a sleeve of his heather tweed jacket.

  R-r-r-i-i-i-i-p-p-p-p-p!

  “Hey! That's my favorite jacket,” Gaelen protested.

  “It's ugly,” one of the brutes muttered, with what might have been a smile on a less stony face.

  Then off came his shirt. His one hundred dollar, handmade dress shirt. It wasn't fairy-tailored, so they had to pull harder, but off it came.

  Gaelen sat, humiliation bubbling with the stomach acid, and waited. It would only get worse.

  The chill of the room and the prickly feeling of all eyes on him made his wings pucker and swell. He thought he could control himself until...

  Oh, no. Not Carly. Anybody but her.

  Carly O'Malley smiled at him from the gallery, and her wings—Oh, Bridget, what wings the woman had—shimmered three shades each of red and gold. The snickering around the table had Gaelen's alread
y rough temper near to boiling.

  “Ah, Gaelen, me boyo, you've a lass interested in seeing your wings.”

  “I've seen ‘em,” Carly said, “and a sight worth waitin’ for they are.”

  Women tittered at Carly's words.

  A sharp snapping pain twisted in his shoulders. Biting his tongue, he winced as the thin skin unfolded, first on the left, then on the right.

  Not good to keep them packed away like that, his ol’ da had said. Gotta shake ‘em out and stretch ‘em once in a while, boy.

  The men on the Council and in the audience grimaced in amused compassion. The women were not so kind.

  They watched, eyes widening, tongues flicking out to moisten their lips, their anticipation palpable.

  Gaelen was a tall man and, he'd been told by women—most recently the exquisite Carly O'Malley—he was extremely well-formed. In all his parts. Of course, he'd kept his wings folded as he always did unless he'd had warning of some ceremonial occasion like this one, but everybody knew that a man's wingspan was precisely equitable to the size of his...

  “Ohhhh,” he moaned, unable to control them as they spurted faster, fuller, taller.

  “Oooooh.” The women echoed his moans with their own.

  “Just look at the coloring!”

  “Wouldn't you just love to see those things sprout over your head in the dark?”

  Sprout.

  “Aren't you finished yet?” Eochy asked. His own wings wagged impatiently, the fairy equivalent to the tapping toe and just as irritating.

  Gaelen tried to relax, but he couldn't resist a quick comment. He was ticked and hoped Eochy knew it.

  “If you'd give people some notice, Eochy, and not spring these things.”

  Eochy smiled. That was always a bad sign.

  “If you'd check your E'mail once in awhile you'd be better informed. I sent a reminder just a week ago, Otherworld time.”

  Gaelen shook out his wings and tried to make himself comfortable with their unfamiliar weight on his shoulders.

  “E'mail? You sent it by E'mail?” He looked around then, scanning the crowd. “Where's Lucas?” When he didn't spot his little brother, he settled back in the chair and smirked at Eochy. “There, see? You must have left us off your E'mail alias, Eochy. Lucas checks the E'mail, and he isn't here either.”

  Eochy smiled again.

  Double-damn.

  “That's right. And if you'll look at your agenda, you'll see Lucas is item number three.”

  His mouth snapped shut and Gaelen jerked his eyes down to the single sheet of paper lying on the table in front of him. Spotting number three, he decided he'd keep his mouth shut for a bit longer.

  The ritual preliminaries passed without Gaelen even hearing them. He'd responded by rote, ignoring the meaning and depth of the words. Still seething, shoulder blades sore, deadlines and unfinished work weighing on his mind—it was all giving him a splitting headache.

  Not to mention having his brother waiting for him at number three.

  “Now,” Eochy intoned, settling his spectacles on the tip of his nose. “Item one, the ‘Fairy Controversy.’ Without objection, since this relates to the matter of item three, we'll pass on to item two, ‘Reclaiming Ireland for Her Indigenous Peoples.'” Eochy pulled off his specs and leaned on the table. “Phelan, I know you mean well,” Eochy said, his eyes meeting those of the man on Gaelen's left, “but we made a deal with them. We can't back out after three thousand years.”

  “But it was a bad deal. That Spaniard con man took us, and we all know it.”

  Eochy squashed a smile. Gaelen felt his own lips move with unwelcome amusement.

  “Well, Phelan, we can all agree that agreeing to splitting Ireland in half and accepting the half underground was not the most shrewd land transaction in the history of the world, but what's done is done. This Council has had this debate at least once a year for three thousand years, and I'm sure everyone is getting tired of it.”

  “I make a motion to table the issue,” one of the Hundred said.

  “I second,” another said.

  Gaelen could predict the process.

  Phelan wasn't to be deterred. “I demand a recorded vote.” He sneered at the assembly. “Just so we know who the weak-kneed fairies are.”

  Moans and expletives in various languages, some of them very interesting to a linguist like Gaelen in their imagination, and the variety of suggestions as to what Phelan could do with himself, various barnyard beasts, and sundry of his own female relatives.

  “Give him his vote, Eochy,” Gaelen muttered, just wanting the whole thing over with. He glanced down again at the agenda and Lucas's name there, and he tried to remember how long it had been since he'd seen his younger brother. And he started to worry.

  Eochy grimaced. “All right, the motion has been made.”

  Gaelen blocked out the droning voices and voting. He focused his mind and tried to find his brother.

  ~*~

  “Holy Bridget!” Lucas Riley struggled through the open window of Erin's house. His shirt stuck to the trickle of blood oozing from his torn wings.

  How could I have been so stupid? Acting like an untried schoolboy on his first outing, forgetting himself to the point of...

  Lucas scrambled over the sill and set one foot down on the floor inside the Tinker's sprawling executive ranch house. It was dark still, but it would be daylight soon and he had to be gone before Mrs. Tinker was up and around.

  He had to check on Erin. The terror on her face just as he popped out was imprinted on his memory and made him heartsick that he'd caused her such anguish. Worse, he'd not been able to stop himself until somewhere near the Great Pyramid. When he'd gotten back to where they'd been parked, Erin was gone.

  “Oh, Bridget! What must she think?” A twisting, mangled ripping mutilated him deep inside. He laughed at himself. “Aye, boyo, and you've got it pretty bad, ha’ you not?”

  Aye, I do, he admitted to himself as he struggled to his feet and headed down the long hallway between the bedrooms at the end of the house, peeking around the doorways, not making a sound, not even breathing. The last thing he needed was for Mrs. Tinker to hear him. He didn't think he could face her yet.

  But no danger was terrifying enough to keep him from his love's side.

  “This one, I think,” he whispered, his voice inaudible even to his own ears. He eased around the doorframe and adjusted to the darkness inside the room. “Erin.”

  The gray outline of a bed faced him.

  She isn't here. “Erin,” he whispered more loudly.

  There was no answer, no uneasy shifting of a sleeping body on the bed.

  “Erin!” he said aloud. “Where are you?”

  ~*~

  There you are, you little punk!

  “Have you located him, Gaelen?”

  Gaelen jerked his eyes from the polished surface of the table to meet Eochy's.

  So, the old bantam was watching me. Gaelen smiled, but didn't answer.

  Eochy studied him for a moment, then bent his gray head over his papers.

  “All right, now that Phelan's nonsense is over for another year, can we please move on to item three?” He perched his specs on the edge of his nose again and peered over them at Gaelen. “This is the most egregious case of miscegenation we've ever had to deal with.”

  Gaelen hated that word—miscegenation—and wondered how his people had chosen it to describe relations between fairies and others. To him, it smacked of evil hiding beneath white sheets, a word born of fear and irrational hatred.

  “Lucas Riley has taken up with a non-fairy woman,” Eochy announced.

  There was no exhaled gasp of surprise. This was really not a big deal.

  “So what, Eochy? Lots of us take up with non-fairies,” Gaelen put in.

  “Of course, but we're not talking about pixies or sprites or the unfortunate attraction some of us have for...” Eochy pulled off his specs and grimaced, “trolls. I, for one, could never underst
and that, but to each his own, I say.”

  “So, Lucas's own is a non-fairy,” Gaelen repeated.

  “She is a human.”

  The gasp of surprise finally rolled over the assembly.

  “Human?” Gaelen sat forward and stared. “I don't believe it. Lucas isn't stupid. He knows the laws.”

  “Know the laws he may, still, he is consorting with a human and he has had relations with her. Not only that, Gaelen, but he allowed her to see his true nature, and she's going to spread the news around that college town like pixie dust at Christmas.” Eochy tossed a tabloid newspaper across the table. It slid the last two feet to stop, opened to the front page, right in front of Gaelen.

  “Read that. Once the reporters get wind of this, the story will be on the newsstands in the next issue.”

  Gaelen lowered his eyes, his stomach already churning. The words on the page jumped out at him, putting his acid pump into overdrive.

  Co-ed's Sad Tale: My Boyfriend was Abducted by Aliens!

  Gaelen swallowed a mouthful of sour spit, then looked for the subheading.

  Ripped from the Arms of His Lover.

  He couldn't read any more.

  “How do you know this is about Lucas? You know, Eochy, these tabloids make all this stuff up,” Gaelen said.

  “Do they?” Eochy relaxed, leaning back in his chair and absently twirling the tip of his wing around his meaty fingers. “What about the face on Mars? Hmmm? And I suppose they just made up the story about Elvis Presley working at a gas station in Kalamazoo? No, Gaelen, these guys are the most tenacious investigators on the planet. I just thank the Lord there are aliens. Otherwise, we would have already been found out and either disbelieved out of existence or the Council of Elders in Ireland would have our heads mounted in the empty places at Newgrange.”

  “Come on, Eochy, they don't take heads anymore.” Even as Gaelen said it, his smile faded. The expressions he saw on the faces around him had him wondering.

  Eochy wasn't smiling at all.

  “The reason the Fairy Controversy was put on the agenda is this. We've gotten directives from the Council in Ireland to cease all contact with mortals. It's just too dangerous.”

  “What!” The word echoed all around the chamber.