Devil's Shore

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by Bernadette Walsh




  Cover Copy

  Take heed. The most powerful Devlin witch in generations has come into her own.

  Orla has left Ireland, and the sinister shadow of Devlin’s Mountain, behind. In the States, she’s just another ordinary housewife and mother. That is, until destiny and Simon Gardiner find her. Compelled to tease the male witch, she wants to abuse him and hurt him. He’s surly, dangerous, and sexy…everything her husband is not. She must show Simon she’s not her meek, subservient mother who’s slave to Slanaitheoir, the Mountain’s demon.

  Orla can no longer deny the power coursing through her veins. Nor can she deny the powerful attraction she feels for Simon. Can she best him in this battle of wills and magic, or like Slanaitheoir has for generations of Devlin witches, will he take everything she cherishes from her?

  Content Warning: Seduction, erotic sex and a witch who will enchant you.

  Highlight

  Simon was a hard taskmaster. After his yoga class, I stayed behind and meditated. As she sometimes did, my dead grandmother Roisin appeared in my mind’s eye. Wrapped in her crimson robe, Roisin held out her hand to me, her green eyes anxious. Alight with electricity, my skin burned. Her mouth moved but I couldn’t understand her words. I shook my head. I’d meant what I said two years ago. I didn’t want the Devlin witches and their legacy of pain, of servitude, of death, to infect me.

  A finger brushed my cheek. Simon knelt before me, his black gaze boring into my eyes. I opened my mouth to say something, but like Roisin, was unable to speak. He moved closer to me, our noses almost touching, while he inhaled my scent. A slight smile played across his lips.

  He stepped away. “You have to leave now.”

  “Of–of course.” I struggled to rise. He didn’t offer to help me, but only stood in the corner, amused by my awkwardness. I felt blood rush to my cheeks.

  “I will see you later?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His black eyes were flat and gave away nothing. “Good. You have much to learn.”

  Devil’s Shore

  By Bernadette Walsh

  Dedication

  To C.A.G., my heart and soul.

  Chapter 1

  As I watched the officers fish my mother’s broken bones from the Feale River, the only thought that ran through my head was, I’m one of them. Every oldest Devlin daughter since the time of the Famine had stood in this very spot and watched, powerless, while men dragged their mothers’ shattered bodies from the Feale.

  I was now one of them.

  My mother’s scarlet cape gleamed in the clear waters of the Feale, guiding the Garda like a beacon to my mother’s twisted limbs. “Look away,” my husband said. But I couldn’t. I’d looked away from my mother and her madness often enough. It was only right that I faced her one last time. I stood on the riverbank, my new summer sandals encased in muck, as Officer Murphy lifted her sad body from the river, her long black hair gleaming in the sun.

  “Mother of God.” Declan crossed himself.

  From some deep recesses of my mind, I recited in Irish the prayer my mother said at this very site the day they found my grandmother Roisin’s body.

  Mna dorcha

  You are released

  You are Heaven’s own

  You are free

  I crossed myself and bowed my head.

  It was done.

  * * * *

  Earlier in the week I’d tried to ignore Caroline’s frantic phone call, but something in my sister-in-law’s voice, her normally sharp New York voice, concerned me, although her story was all too familiar. My mother was raving. Again. Sleep wouldn’t come that night. Instead, dreams of my grandmother, Roisin. The aul bitch. Dressed in the Devlin red robe, she tormented me every time I drifted off to sleep.

  “Your mother needs you,” she said in my dreams. “Come. Come to Kilvarren before it’s too late. It’s your duty.”

  I opened my eyes for the twentieth time that night and, God help me, swore I saw the outline of a black-haired woman hovering at the end of the bed.

  “Enough,” I said in a harsh whisper. “You win. We’ll leave in the morning.”

  The apparition nodded and then disappeared, leaving me to my slumber.

  As Declan drove us through the summer rain and our three sons squabbled in the back, I thought I’d face yet another one of my mother’s episodes. At worst, another trip for her to the county home. But nothing, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for crowds of people wandering Kilvarren’s streets, weeping. I saw my sister-in-law sprawled on the pavement outside of Collins’s Grocery, her face in her hands.

  I jumped out of the car, leaving Declan and the boys behind.

  “Caroline. What is it? What’s happened?” I grabbed her arm and dragged her to her feet.

  “I, uh...”

  “What? For fuck’s sake, what is it?”

  Bridget Griffin, my mother’s neighbor, touched my arm. “It’s your mother, love. She’s gone.”

  I turned to face her. “What do you mean gone? Do you mean dead?”

  “Yes.”

  My throat closed. I could only croak out, “How?”

  Bridget sighed and pointed to the Mountain, Devlin’s Mountain, in the distance. “The usual way.”

  Caroline, now that the worst had been said, found her voice. “I’m so sorry, Orla. But she was bad. I told you she was bad.”

  Her pale, oh-so-earnest face made my blood boil. Jesus, what had my poor brother ever seen in this sad excuse for a woman? Before I could stop myself I slapped her, hard. “I told you to go home. If this is anyone’s fault, it’s yours.”

  The outline of my hand blazed on Caroline’s cheek. Mouth hanging open, she looked too stunned to cry.

  “Hush now, girls. The whole town is watching you.” Bridget enveloped me in her arms. She whispered in my ear. “It’s no one’s fault, love. ’Twas her fate. You know that. ’Twas only her fate.”

  I pushed her away. “It may have been her fate but it sure as hell won’t be mine.”

  * * * *

  The death of a Devlin woman was always a spectacle. Kilvarren town shut down for two days and the diaspora of the Mountain’s original five families, from Dublin, Galway, London, Toronto and New York, all found their way to the Mountain. To pay homage to the Mountain’s whore, the Devlin witch upon whose slight shoulders–according to legend anyway–lay the weight of the Five Families’ sins.

  Although I wasn’t sure to what extent, if any, the younger generation bought into this nonsense. I’d been raised in Dublin and was a Dub through and through. To me, the old stories were just that, only stories. As far as I could tell they’d served solely as fodder for my mother’s madness, gave substance to her delusions. Those old stories and that godforsaken Mountain had a lot to answer for.

  Every Kilvarren pub was full, in every house a party. Music filled the streets as the ritual waking for the Devlin witch overtook the small town. On the Mountain, too, a group of the aul ones gathered in the back field around a bonfire, chanting in the old tongue. Their lilting voices were carried by the soft summer breeze, through the fields and into my mother’s hot, cramped kitchen. I’d have shut the window if I hadn’t been sure we’d roast inside without some air.

  So I sat at her scarred kitchen table and sorted through the reams of papers my mother had stuffed in battered shoe boxes. Electric bills, the deed to the cottage, my brother’s death notice all jumbled together. As her only surviving child it was my duty to sort through the detritus of my poor mad mother’s life.

  Declan stole behind me and kissed the top of my head. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  I turned to him. The expression on his pale freckled face was full of concern.

  “Yes, love. It’ll be easier fo
r me to settle things here without that lot,” I said, pointing to our older two sons, seven and five, redheads like their father, who were wrestling in my mother’s sitting room.

  “It doesn’t feel right, leaving you on your own.”

  “Please, Dec, go. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  He kissed me then, on the lips. “All right. You’re the boss.” He looked over to our sons. “Come on, lads. Time to go.”

  I helped him load the car and buckled the youngest, Niall, into his car seat. Everything important to me, my life, really, buckled into the battered red Opel. I kissed Declan through the open window. “Tell your mother I said thanks for looking after the kids.”

  “It’s no bother, love. She’s happy to do it.”

  I waved to my little family as they bounced down the rutted drive, back to civilization and away from this accursed Mountain.

  The chanting reached a fevered pitch and I could see the black smoke from the bonfire in the distance. According to legend, all the dead Devlin witches, or ‘martyrs’ as the locals called them, would walk the Mountain tonight. The chanting, the parties were in homage to those dear departed woman who’d given their lives in service to Slanaitheoir, the Mountain god. Or Mountain demon, as some would say.

  Personally, I thought it was an excuse for the now far-flung Mountain families to come home and get drunk, but I didn’t say that to anyone. I’d offended enough of them when I’d refused to participate in their chanting party in the back field. And some thought it was my duty, as the next Devlin woman in line, to abandon my life in Dublin and live in this hole. One old crow stopped me in Collins’s Grocery yesterday and asked me who was to save them now, if I didn’t come back to the Mountain and take my mother’s place. “You’ll have to save yourselves,” I told her, as Caroline’s aunt, Dottie Collins, looked on, her pale blue eyes the size of saucers.

  And what of my dear sister-in-law? True to form, she’d cleared out of here as soon as there was any real work to be done. “I’m here for you. Let me know if you need anything,” she’d said. I’m here for you. What does that even mean? I’m here for you. Only a Yank would say something so stupid. So meaningless.

  Get off your arse and clean out a press. Or box up the dishes. Or sort through one hundred and fifty years of papers, books, clothes. I’m here for you. Please.

  But, as Bridget Griffin told me, poor Caroline’s in the family way, pregnant by Bridget’s young son. How that pale wren of a woman found not one handsome man, but two, is beyond me. I knew I wasn’t much to look at, but for God’s sake, Caroline with her simpering and her poor-me sighs... Who’d sign up for a lifetime of that? She’d do your head in.

  Ah, it’d be easier to sort through this mess on my own anyway. I filled the kettle and looked out the back window. The late evening sun lit up my mother’s garden. The primrose, the foxglove, all gleamed. In the right light, this was a beautiful spot. I can see why my mother missed it when she lived in Dublin. Beyond the garden gate stood the old goat, the pucan, that had wandered the Mountain for as long as I could remember. The pucan that somehow managed to outlive my grandmother and mother both. But it couldn’t possibly be the same goat. It must be the son of a son of a son. This one, with its gleaming black eyes, looked young and bold as it stared into my window.

  “Always salute the pucan and then look away,” my grandmother Roisin told me on one of my infrequent childhood visits to the Mountain. Salute him? Fuck that. I smiled, gave the goat the finger and then went back to making tea.

  Three hours later the chanting finally stopped. I’d cleared out two presses and burned reams of old useless papers. In addition to schizophrenia, apparently hoarding also ran through the Devlin bloodline.

  Sweaty and covered with newsprint, I stripped and took a hot shower. The only improvement my mother made to the old cottage was installing an electric shower. The almost scalding water felt good against my tight shoulders.

  I dried myself with a threadbare towel that smelled slightly of mildew and then slipped on a soft nightdress. The strangeness I’d originally felt at sleeping in my dead mother’s bed had by now worn off. It was the only decent bed in the house and I was tired, too exhausted to feel squeamish.

  I’d begun to drift off when the bedcovers were ripped off me. “Wake up, Orla.”

  The room was chill and damp. I sat up and opened my eyes but could see nothing in the pitch black room. I struggled to find the unfamiliar lamp.

  At the end of my bed stood a young woman with long black hair and green eyes, encased in a long red robe. The Devlin robe. She held out her hand to me. “Orla, love.”

  “Granny?” Although this apparition bore little resemblance to the older woman I’d remembered from my youth, around the eyes and mouth she looked like my grandmother Roisin.

  “Yes, Orla. It is me, Roisin.”

  I laughed. “Sweet Mother of God, I’ve lost it now.” I reached for the pack of Silk Cut on the bedside table.

  “No, love, don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm.”

  I lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. “Well, that’s good to know. So how’ve ye been? Are you enjoying the aul wake?”

  “Orla, be serious. We don’t have much time and I’ve much to tell you.”

  “How’s my mother? Is she enjoying the afterlife?”

  “Not yet, no. She’s away gathering her strength. Death for a Devlin woman is always hard.”

  “Ah, so it’s like she’s away on her holidays, is it? Maybe she’ll send me a postcard, so.”

  Roisin walked over to the bed and grabbed my arm. The cold emanating from her hand tore through my arm. The pain brought tears to my eyes.

  “Enough, Orla.” She let go of my arm.

  I rubbed my arm, which had turned numb. “Fine, say what you have to say and then get out.”

  “Your mother was wrong not to tell you about your history, the Devlin history.”

  “My mother was wrong about a lot of things, but believe me, I know more than enough about the Devlins.”

  “You are Mary’s only daughter. You are next in line.”

  I took another drag from my cigarette. “For what? The mental ward?”

  “Your powers will come to you soon and you must be prepared.”

  “Prepared?”

  “You are the sole heir to the Devlin legacy. Not only are you now the Devlin witch, you are the first in over one hundred and fifty years not to be beholden to Slanaitheoir. That means your powers will be strong, much stronger than mine or your mother’s.”

  “Slanaitheoir is just a story. He’s not real.”

  “He is.” Roisin placed her cold hand upon my forehead. “You know he is.” She closed my eyes with her cold fingers.

  No more than five, I was playing in my grandmother’s garden. A kitten rubbed against my leg. It ran outside the garden gate. I chased it down the road. It was fast and I struggled to keep up. It headed for the woods. I followed it and then a man, a tall man, even taller than my daddy, grabbed me. With His black hair and green eyes, He was the scariest man I ever saw. He lifted me by my hair off the ground.

  The next thing I remember, I was lying on a cold stone table, like an altar at church. I couldn’t move, couldn’t open my eyes, and I hurt. All over. The tall man was next to me. I heard voices.

  “Return her to us, healed and unharmed,” my Granny commanded.

  “She is defective,” the man said. “I will not accept this one. Tell your slut of a daughter to make me another.”

  “The Agreement is clear,” my grandmother said in a voice I’d never heard her use before. “You will receive the oldest daughter from each generation and no other. If you kill this one, there will be no more from my line.”

  I felt the man hover over me. His breath, his horrible stinky breath, filled my nostrils. “Look at it, fat and ugly. No. This is not a suitable Devlin woman. Let’s kill it and start anew.”

  “Return her to us unharmed. If you don’t, the Agreement is broken and Mary an
d I will be free.”

  “No!” He roared.

  “Oh, yes, my lord,” my grandmother said, her voice low but strong. “The Agreement is quite clear.”

  “Fine, take her.” He lifted me up. “But first I want to give her something to remember me by.” Teeth ripped my arm. My eyes snapped open and I saw my mother and grandmother, pale and speechless. I screamed as I flew through the air and landed at my mother’s feet.

  “That didn’t happen. You told me I was bitten by a spider. Are you saying you lied to me?”

  Granny touched the indentation on my left arm. “Of course we lied to you. What else could we do? I gave you tablets and you slept for hours after we brought you home. When you woke, we told you that you wandered away from the house into the woods and were bitten by a spider.”

  “So that thing in the woods wanted to kill me? Because I was fat.”

  “You favor your father’s side. Slanaitheoir likes his women to look like this.” She touched her cheek.

  “You mean he likes his woman to look like Him. Are we all related to that thing?”

  “I believe so. So the stories say. He calls us His children.”

  “Except the fat ones. Those ones He wants to kill.”

  “Orla, your fair hair and blue eyes are a gift. Slanaitheoir rejected you because of them. This is an opportunity for all of us.”

  “An opportunity?”

  “Yes. Slanaitheoir drains the Devlin witches, blunts our powers. But He has rejected you. That means you’ll be the strongest Devlin witch in over one hundred and fifty years.”

  “But I’m not a witch. I’m a Dublin housewife.”

  “Your powers should come to you soon and then you can fight Slanaitheoir.”

  “I’m not fighting anyone. This is madness. Just a bad dream.”

  “’Tis no dream, love. If your mother is dead and Slanaitheoir’s attentions are not on you, then where do you think they are?”

  “Who knows? Who cares?”

 

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