“No!” she cried, digging her fingers into the bark and pressing her body closer. “Wake up! Give up your stored energy, TarStone, and nourish my pine!”
When still nothing happened, Winter slid to her knees, turned, and leaned against the lifeless trunk, burying her face in her hands. All was lost, including her magic. She couldn’t even feel TarStone’s energy; she couldn’t feel anything but the dark, colorless void of…of nothing.
Winter sobbed uncontrollably, surrendering to self-pity and shame. She had been so busy being happy and hopeful that she had neglected the real threat right under her nose. Thinking love alone would make everything right, she hadn’t even bothered to consider the strength of her enemy’s determination.
How naive she had been, and how foolish to have so readily dismissed the power of despair. She knew that when something had been set into motion, be it a physical object or a train of thought, that it wanted to stay in motion. For one thousand years, despair had been hurtling toward mankind’s end, gaining momentum to the point that even her own promised destiny hadn’t been able to stop it.
She didn’t have what it took to be a drùidh. She was so blind to the negative energy that made up the dark side of life, she was ineffectual to recognize it, much less defeat it.
Which brought Winter back to her question to Daar. If she didn’t have the wisdom to be a drùidh, to be powerful and smart enough to vanquish despair, then why had she even been born?
Winter reached in her jacket and pulled out her pencil. She swiped her tears away so she could see and rolled the pencil between her fingers as she thought about what she could do. She flicked her wrist—only to gasp when her pencil suddenly turned into her pinewood staff! She stared at the softly vibrating stick, and her heart thumped with renewed hope as she felt the energy’s warmth flow through her body.
All wasn’t lost. She still possessed the magic!
Matt. She needed to talk to her husband; he would know what to do. Maybe they could combine their strengths and bring her tree back to life.
But Matt had left long before daybreak to finally give Tom the supersonic ride he had been promised. Oh, why had Tom asked to go today of all days!
And Father Daar couldn’t help her, since he’d lost his own power. Robbie! Maybe Robbie could help. But then Winter remembered Daar had told her the pine was Robbie’s source of power as well. Had his guardian energy died with the tree?
Winter pulled out her cell phone and punched in Robbie’s number, and Catherine answered on the fifth ring. “Hello,” Winter said. “Is Robbie home?”
“No,” Catherine told her. “He’s at Gù Brath with your sisters. Happy birthday,” she added. “How come you aren’t at breakfast with everyone? Finding it hard to get out of bed being a newlywed?”
“I…ah, I’m just headed over there now,” she told Cat.
“Then I guess I’ll see you this afternoon at the big bash.” Cat laughed. “I still can’t believe all you girls were born on the same day. Everyone made it home for the party, didn’t they?”
“Yes, everyone’s come home, including husbands and children. I have to get going, Cat, before they eat all the food. Thanks for the birthday wish, and I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“Bye,” Catherine said, hanging up.
Winter pressed the End button, stared at her phone for several seconds, then dialed Gù Brath. But she quickly pushed End again before it could ring.
She just couldn’t bring herself to ruin everyone’s day. This might be the last birthday the seven of them spent together, so how could she call home in a panic and pull her papa and Robbie away when they were also helpless to do anything?
Matt was still her best hope. He still had his power, didn’t he? Or had he been tapping her pine tree, since it had grown from the root of his own tree? Darn it, she should have been more curious about the source of his energy.
And that was when Winter realized exactly where she’d gone wrong. Since the day she’d sat in the cave with her back to Matt and he’d told her his heartbreaking story, all she had thought about was how she could fix the mess he had made. She’d never once stopped to consider that maybe Matt was the one who needed to do the fixing.
How arrogant she’d been about loving Matt unconditionally. How obsessed she’d become with making everything right, to the point that she’d forgotten about Matt’s very real need to be part of the solution.
Darn it, where was that crow when she needed him! Why couldn’t he have explained all this to her in her dream, instead of giving her just enough information to make her think she could right another man’s wrong all by herself? She wasn’t the means to the end, she was only half of the answer! She couldn’t make Matt find hope; she could only encourage him to look deep within himself to find it again.
Winter hugged her pinewood staff to her bosom, closed her eyes, and willed her husband to come back at twice the speed of sound. Darn it, she needed him right now; he should darn well sense her desperation. That’s what being married was all about. They were a team, and it was going to take the both of them to fix this mess.
She wasn’t giving up. She refused to lose hope. She had her staff and she had Matt, and they had their baby’s future to protect. And if they blew the top off Bear Mountain getting at that accursed energy inside, then by God, that’s exactly what she and Matt would do—together!
Winter stood beside her old Suburban at the Pine Creek airport and held her hand over her racing heart, undecided if it was still pounding from dread or from her record-breaking snowshoe run down the mountain to where she’d parked her truck. But she could finally feel herself calming down as she worked the genes she’d inherited from her mama and weighed the possibilities and probabilities of various courses of action she and Matt could take.
She did have a few good points to consider. For one thing, her staff was still powerful. And Matt’s staff was too, she hoped. Second, the sun was still shining, the earth was still spinning, and the apocalypse hadn’t suddenly arrived with the death of her pine, which only proved her theory that as long as there was life, there was hope. Winter lowered her hand from her heart to her belly as she came to her third and most positive point: the future was growing inside her, and Winter knew Matt would help her move heaven and earth to protect their child.
The odds were in their favor, Winter decided, and just as soon as her husband got back they would head up to the cliff on Bear Mountain. And there Winter would call on the genes she’d inherited from her papa, and combine her warrior’s heart with Matt’s to vanquish once and for all the energy bent on destroying them.
Winter shaded her eyes to see the sleek jet setting up for a landing, and snorted at the irony of it all. It appeared that it mattered naught if Providence was hoping to bring feminine thinking to the forefront; it was still going to take a fierce battle to win the war.
She watched the jet set down on the tarmac, its engine reversing with deafening power to slow it down, and Winter decided she didn’t dare discount the negatives. There was still that unknown energy that appeared determined to punish her husband for a thousand-year-old mistake. Not that Matt hadn’t already been punished enough by having to live with the knowledge that Kenzie had suffered for centuries because of him. And then there was Winter’s worry that nine weeks of marriage wasn’t quite long enough for Matt to realize that he did love her just as much as she loved him.
But the optimism she’d inherited from both of her parents, Winter decided as the jet taxied back down the narrow runway, still put the odds in her and Matt’s favor. Two people of like minds, with their two hearts beating as one, had the strength of a legion of warriors.
The jet came to a halt by the tiny hangar and the engine whined down to a stop. Winter started running toward the jet just as the side door opened and a set of stairs dropped onto the tarmac. Matt emerged first and ran toward her, catching Winter in his arms long before she reached the jet.
“What is it?” he asked, holding her a
gainst him. “What’s wrong?”
“My pine is dead,” she said, looking up at him. “Somebody dug a hole down to its roots and killed it.”
He took hold of her shoulders and held her facing him, his golden eyes dark with concern. “You’re sure it’s dead? You couldn’t feel anything? Not even a spark of life?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t even feel TarStone’s energy. It’s all gone. Except for my staff,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out her pencil. “It still has power.”
He frowned. “It shouldn’t. Not if your tree is dead.” His hands on her shoulders tightened. “You said the hole was dug down to the roots?” His frown deepened. “Then he must have been after the tap root, and that means at least part of your tree is still alive.”
“Woo-wee, that was one hell of a ride,” Tom said, walking up to them.
Matt turned and slid his arm around Winter, anchoring her to his side. “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he told Tom as he gave the old hermit a tight smile. “But next time we go up, I’m wearing a G-force suit. Within five minutes of taking the controls, you pretty near had us turned inside out.”
Tom chuckled in delight. “Aw,” he scoffed, waving Matt’s concern away, “that was just a little maneuver I learned from my grandfather years ago.”
Winter eyed him curiously. “You have a grandfather?”
“Don’t we all?” Tom said with a laugh. “Oh, by the way, happy birthday.”
“That’s right,” Winter said. “You’re supposed to tell me your life story today.” She stepped away from her husband, slipped her arm through Tom’s, and started leading him toward Matt’s truck parked beside the hangar. “So, Mr. no-last-name Tom, who are you?”
“It’s not your official birthday yet,” Tom said with another laugh, lifting his free arm to pull back his sleeve. “You told me you were born at the exact time of the winter solstice, and that doesn’t occur for another six hours and…and twenty-three minutes,” he said, squinting at his watch. “Which means,” he added, covering her hand with his, “twenty-five years ago from right now, you weren’t even born yet.”
Winter rolled her eyes and started them walking again. “You’re doing it on purpose, making me wait just because you know it drives me crazy. So does that mean I don’t get my gift when we take you home this morning?” She pouted up at him when they stopped beside Matt’s truck. “You’re not really going to make me wait until the party this afternoon, are you?”
Tom ran his hand down her hair, pushing it back over her shoulder. “You’ll get your gift in exactly six hours and twenty-two minutes.”
Matt chuckled seeing Winter’s frown as he opened the back passenger door and took hold of her arm. “We’ll come back and get your Suburban later,” he told her, helping her climb in and handing her the seat belt before softly closing the door.
He opened the front passenger door. “Thank God there’s not a steering wheel on this side,” he said as Tom climbed in the front seat. “Or you’d be trying to pull another triple loop.”
“Did you really do loops in Matt’s jet?” Winter asked when Matt closed the door and walked around the front of the truck, which now had an eight-foot snowplow attached.
“Just one triple,” Tom said with a chuckle. “But I quit when your husband started to turn green.”
“So you used to fly jets, did you?”
“Six hours and twenty-one minutes, Miss Impatience.”
Winter fell silent once Matt got in and started the truck, letting her husband carry the conversation with Tom as they headed toward Bear Mountain. Tom had arrived at their cottage in the wee hours before dawn, having snowshoed the mile down the shoreline to meet Matt for their jet ride.
Winter had waited until they’d left before she’d thrown back the covers and gotten dressed to head out to greet the sunrise with her pine. Her poor tree, she thought sadly as she looked out the side window. For all of its towering size, it hadn’t even been three years old when someone—or something—had come along and lopped off its top, then finished it off by digging up its roots.
The closer to home they got, the more impatient Winter became to get up to that cliff, and the madder she got when she thought about her murdered tree. But it seemed to take forever to navigate the road down to their cottage. Matt hadn’t wanted to build a new road along the shore, and had carefully engineered this spur off the old road so it didn’t intrude on the meadow or Bear Brook. The results were a very narrow and winding path that followed the contour of the rugged land, and the foot of new snow that Matt had only minimally plowed on his way out this morning added even more precious minutes to the arduous journey.
They reached home around ten in the morning, and Tom used up another twenty minutes telling Matt what a beautiful job he’d done on the cottage as they stood outside looking at the log and stone structure. It was ten-thirty before Tom finally strapped on his snowshoes to head down the shore toward his own cabin.
“If you come back by one o’clock,” Matt called after him, “you can ride to Gù Brath with us.”
Tom stopped and looked back. “No need. I’ll get there on my own. But thanks.”
Winter waited beside Matt as they both watched Tom disappear into the dense woods, then turned and grabbed Matt’s sleeve and started dragging him back toward his truck. “Come on, let’s get going.”
“Where?” he asked, pulling them to a stop.
“To the meadow. We are getting inside that cliff today if we have to blow the entire mountain to hell.”
He lifted a brow. “When did you decide violence was the answer? I thought you were convinced love and compassion and hope was enough to keep the world spinning.”
“I decided it when someone tortured and murdered our tree of life. And he’s in that cliff with our tap root, and we’re damn well going to blow him to hell if we have to, to get it back.”
Matt lifted a brow at her cussing. “So it’s our tree now, and the energy in the cliff is a him?” he said calmly. He took hold of her shoulders and shook his head. “We wait, Winter. We go to Gù Brath this afternoon and attend your birthday party, and then we’ll go to the cliff tonight.”
“But why wait?”
“Because of Kenzie,” he softly reminded her. “He’ll become himself on the solstice in another few hours, and you still have enough power to make him stay that way this time. And I want it done before we try to penetrate the cliff because I don’t know what we’ll find inside. But even if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, my brother will at least have the dignity of dying human.”
Winter stared up at her husband, then suddenly threw herself against his chest and wrapped her arms around him in a fierce hug. “Oh, Matt, I’m sorry,” she whispered past the lump in her throat. “I wasn’t thinking. Of course we’ll help Kenzie first.” She leaned away and blinked through her tears to smile at him. “Is…is he as handsome as you are?”
Matt kissed the tip of her nose and pulled her tightly against him again, holding her head over his strong warrior’s heart. “Do you remember the look on Megan’s face when I walked into your gallery that first day?” he asked, and Winter nodded against him. “Well, she’ll probably faint the first time she sees Kenzie.” He kissed the top of her head. “But Fiona was really the one with the good looks in our family. She took after our mother.”
He used her hair to gently lift her face to his and kissed her. “This evening after the party, we’ll bring Pendaär, Robbie, and your papa with us, and we’ll go to the cliff together and see if our combined strengths can’t open it up.” He smiled tightly. “And if we still can’t budge the rock, I’ll let you and your lethal pencil raise your own havoc.”
Winter leaned into him. “So what do we do until this afternoon?” she whispered. “I’ll go crazy just sitting around here waiting and worrying.”
He brushed his fingers through her hair. “I suppose we could build a fire in the hearth and play Monopoly.”
“Naw,” she
whispered, shaking her head. “I don’t care much for losing to you again.”
“We could soak in the hot tub until we wrinkle,” he offered next. “That might relax you enough to actually enjoy your party. And you can go over everyone’s names for me—uncles and aunts included—and who they’re married to, what they have for kids, and what each of their husbands does for a living.” She looked up and he smiled. “I’m never going to keep everyone straight. Gù Brath must be near bursting with people just from your sisters and their families. Do you have this party every year before Christmas?”
“Yes,” she said, stroking his ribs as she stood in his loose embrace. “And every summer solstice we do it again with mama’s six brothers, their wives, and children and grandchildren.” She reached up and started toying with one of the buttons on his shirt. “But I don’t feel like reciting my family tree right now.”
“Then what do you feel like doing?”
She flattened her hand on his chest, right over his heart. “Do you love me, Matt?”
“Aye,” he whispered. “More than life itself, lass.”
Winter couldn’t hide her surprise, or her frown. “Since when?”
“Since you took my hand and led me through the woods that night, to listen to TarStone breathing.”
Since then? He’d loved her from the very beginning? “We’d just met,” she snapped. “And you hustled me down the mountain before I even had a chance to catch my breath.” She smacked his chest. “I asked you in the cave if you loved me, and you said you couldn’t ever love anyone.”
He captured her hand and held it over his heart. “I didn’t realize that I loved you then. Not until later.”
“When, later?”
“When you stood in a seedy little chapel in Vegas and pledged yourself to not only Matheson Gregor, but to Cùram de Gairn.”
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