Descending

by C E Dimond

  “This is weird!” I said, my voice muffled through the helmet.

  I’d never even been on a motorcycle before and now I was supposed to trust my eighteen-year-old sister could get me safely home?

  “Just shut up and hold on!”

  Hesitantly, I wrapped my arms around her waist and held on tight as the bike revved and took off onto the street. I wasn’t a fan of the speed we’d been hurling through the city at. It was expected, ever since the accident, I’d been a bit wary of being on the road at all. Hurling down it exposed on a bike didn’t make the feeling more settled.

  Still, she weaved us in and out of traffic with surprising ease and I managed to gain some calm. I held on tightly until we came to an abrupt stop outside of, what looked like, an abandoned home.

  I waited for a moment, hoping, praying even, that she was going to take off again and keep driving down the street. Instead, she cut the engine of the bike and silence settled around us.

  No such luck then.

  Climbing off the bike, I steadied myself on my feet again before pulling the helmet off. I held it in my hands as I stared at the house before us.

  “Please tell me we’re not going in here,” I begged.

  The last time I’d wandered into an abandoned house, it had been McLoughlin Manor and I had found out a whole lot I hadn’t bargained for.

  I heard her climb off the bike behind me, and seconds later she was taking the helmet from my grasp.

  “We’re not going in here,” she offered unconvincingly.

  I signed in defeat.

  “We’re going in here aren’t we?”

  “Of course we are,” She snapped.

  Moving past me, she opened the short iron gate and began her way up the overgrown path towards the door.

  “Now or never Finn, if you stay out here too long those blokes might find you again,” She warned.

  I shifted my weight, forward, then back, as I contemplated the decision. To go, or not to go. She was giving me a choice and yet, it didn’t quite feel like I really had an option. Soon enough my hesitation weight shift had turned into a full-on rocking motion.

  “Oh for God’s sake Finn, just come on!”

  Finally, I relented.

  I took a full step forward before I found myself walking up the path and following her through the door. It was dark inside as she stepped ahead of me, but the moment the latch caught as the door shut behind us, the hall illuminated itself.

  “Whoa,” I muttered, “did you do that?” I questioned turning my gaze back to her.

  She seemed so much stronger than me, physically, magically. I could only assume it meant her magic was far more refined than my own.

  “Yeah,” she confessed, “I turned on the light switch.”

  “Oh.”

  Right, electricity.

  Magic had quickly gone from being a foreign concept to the only thing that appeared to occupy my mind. It was so dominating, I felt myself beginning to forget the obvious, human solutions.

  “Make yourself at home. I don’t cook so, if you’re hungry you have to eat something in the fridge, there may be some leftover take away, but I haven’t been here in a couple days, so I wouldn’t necessarily trust it.” She confessed hanging her ebony colored leather jacket in the hall. She kicked off her black biker boots and walked into the sitting room.

  The house was beautiful. Far more beautiful than I could have expected. From the outside, it had looked abandoned and ready to crumble. Inside, it was pristine.

  I waited for a moment, before following her through.

  “This is not exactly what I was expecting from the outside.” I admitted and I thought I’d heard her chuckle.

  “Yeah, it’s a bit of a mirage. A glamour. From the outside, it looks like no one’s home.” She explained. “They won’t even see the light. Makes people leave you alone when it looks like your home’s abandoned.”

  “A hermits pipe dream.”

  The sitting room too was far warmer than I’d expected. A crimson velvet chaise and matching loveseat were angled towards a blackened fireplace, one that was not emitting any heat.

  As though she had read my mind, I watched as Izzy flicked her wrist with ease and a flame appeared on the logs.

  I blinked in surprise, that was a trick I hadn’t yet mastered, or even been taught for that matter.

  As I continued to look around the room my eyes settled on a familiar object, with words I had seen once before embossed upon its face, Ár leabhar draíochta.

  “Wait,” I started, “This book was in the house,” back at Broadhaven, the house Neely and I had taken to exploring long before the idea of arriving here had even settled into my mind.

  This book had been in McLoughlin Manor.

  Now, it was here.

  How?

  “Yeah, I took it.” Izzy admitted with a shrug, “Dad wasn’t comfortable with the idea that the others could get their hands on it should they wish.”

  It sounded so strange coming from her lips, Dad. She referred to him so comfortably, which was a very foreign concept to me.

  I had never really had the opportunity to use the term Dad. Will had died long before I could remember being able to give him such a title.

  Even though I didn’t remember calling him it, to me, Dad was still Will Adams. I wasn’t sure I wanted that to change anytime soon, no matter what she had to say about him.

  “When I was keeping an eye on you; I saw your little adventure back home… I didn’t like that the O’Brien kid found a way inside with such ease.”

  “The O’Brien kid is named Neely,” I said, a little more defensive than I’d intended.

  “Like I care.”

  “You should care,” that was the point of all this, wasn’t it? “Like it or not, you were born part of their Coven too. You say Cormac rescued you. Well, they would have too, if they’d known you were alive.” I assured her. “They didn’t”

  Patrick had not known; of that I was sure. He’d been so angry when I’d tried to talk to him about her at first before he’d eventually come around.

  “They came for me,” I reminded her. I was sure that in time if they had known, they would have done the same for her.

  Her existence meant I wasn’t everything they thought I was.

  I wasn’t the only Witch of two bloodlines, I wasn’t the only Witch in general.

  She was the first-born daughter, for all I knew, she was the one who was supposed to be completing this prophecy, not me. If that was the case, she was welcome to it.

  I lingered a moment on that thought.

  Cormac had come for her when she was sixteen. If my father had known about her for two years and still felt the need to come after me, there was more to the prophecy than any of us understood.

  “Sure, sixteen years later, when you suddenly became useful to them,” she pointed out. “They’re not your friends Finn, no matter what you tell yourself.”

  I didn’t want to believe her, but she was dragging up the same doubts I had struggled with upon first arriving at Broadhaven.

  Why had they waited so long to find me?

  Were they really just using me as a means to an end, an outcome in their favor?

  I thought that I had shoved all those concerns aside, but as she pressed the issue, I couldn’t help but let the doubts slip back into my mind.

  “Then why didn’t he come for me?” I asked then.

  Cormac had no trouble finding Izzy and he’d thought she’d been dead. If he had supposedly known I was alive this whole time, then why then had he waited so long to come and find me.

  “Because he didn’t want to take you away from your life before you were ready. Unlike some of us, you had a pretty sweet deal in Port Moyle, he didn’t want to throw a wrench in that.”

  She was making him out to be the father of the year again, I wasn’t sure I had the patience for it. My head hurt and I didn’t want to hear any more of her pitch.

  “And yet he took my Mot
her captive.” I snarled, the mother I had just narrowly missed out on rescuing and now really had no idea where to look for her.

  “He didn’t.” she argued. “He doesn’t know who did, but hate to break it to you darling, Dad doesn’t have her.”

  Her last words echoed in the room, as though she had shouted them at the top of her lungs. I looked in her eyes, studied her face, and I knew, that she wasn’t lying.

  True or not, she genuinely believed the words she was saying.

  “Just because you believe something’s true, doesn’t mean it is,” I managed out quietly.

  It didn’t matter what I said to her. She believed him, believed in him, believed that he was telling her the God honest truth. There was no point in fighting with her now.

  I however, still wasn’t so sure I could put any of my trust in him.

  I watched as she ran her hand through her black hair, the frustration with me evident on her features. At least the one thing I could take from this was learning that she wasn’t a very good liar. She turned her piercing green eyes back to me then and that same uneasy sense of familiarity came over me before she stepped closer.

  “You can believe what you want to believe, but I know the truth, and the sooner you accept what I’m saying as Gospel the quicker you’ll be able to move on.”

  She turned away then and I watched as she snatched the ancient book off the table and flopped down on the couch, in front of the now crackling fire. She cracked the spine, pouring over the spells that filled its pages.

  I was tempted to look at the book myself. The one time I’d had it in my grasp had been short, I hadn’t really gotten to look through it and then I had been forbidden from ever returning to it. That might not have stopped me if everything hadn’t taken a swift turn.

  Tyler, Boston, Faeries; all of it had distracted me from my true purpose at Broadhaven, to learn. Carefully following her I took a seat in a chair next to her and watched as she read through the book with such intensity.

  “We don’t really look alike,” I mused aloud, I had been looking at her more than at the book. This was really the first time I’d had a calm place to just look at her. My sister. “I mean we sort of do but…”

  “Here I thought it was like looking in a mirror,” she mumbled sarcastically, before lifting her eyes from the page. “Clearly, you got all of the Cavanaugh genetics, I got the McLoughlin ones. Genetics are weird.” An easy way of explaining why I was blonde and she was not.

  I knew that well enough. In third grade, I’d known twins who looked nothing alike. Monica had black hair and dark brown eyes, while her twin Katya had blonde hair and blue eyes. No one had believed they were twins because of our limited understanding of the word. We all believed that twins were supposed to look alike.

  “No,” I said gently, “It’s not just that. I see Niamh in you.” I confessed, which were the features that I had already agreed we shared, nose, lips, even the shape of our eyes. “There’s just …something.” Something different that we didn’t share, that I wasn’t even sure she shared with Cormac, something… well, inexplicable it seemed.

  “Whatever. Look, you can stop your little escapades to the archives,” she informed me, “everything you need to know about our family, is in this book.” Closing it she handed it over to me, hovering it before my face, waiting for me to take it. “Straight down to the prophecy.”

  I looked at the book with hesitance and before I could take it, she plopped it right down on my lap.

  “You need to forget about Broadhaven. Our legacy? It’s here, in this book, this Country; it’s surrounding us, and it’s about time you took advantage of it.”

  “So where is he then?” I asked. He had obviously sent her to retrieve me, was he upstairs? A cellar perhaps? He seemed like the cellar-dwelling type.

  “Dad?” She laughed, and confusion fluttered across my features. “He’s not here, he doesn’t want to overwhelm you, at least not until it’s time.”

  “How considerate,” I muttered.

  “You’re not a prisoner here Fionnuala, you can come and go as you please. No one is keeping you here.”

  I nodded in understanding but wondering why she had even bothered to bring me there to begin with.

  “You’re free to see your friends, but if you want the book, it cannot leave this house,” she warned, “and that wolfy friend of yours, I’d keep her close, she could come in handy. But I’d rather not have her in the house.” My eyes widened ever so slightly as felt the color drain from my skin.

  “How did y-"

  “How did I know?” We were finishing each other’s sentences already.

  I nodded trying to shake free of some of my shock.

  “Simple, since arriving here, my power has doubled. I can sense more than I ever imagined possible. This land is magic, and if you know how to tap into it that can make all the difference. I knew she wasn’t strictly human the moment I set my eyes on her. If you stick around, I can teach you.”

  I glanced down at the book in my lap, my fingertips gently grazing over the cracked leather binding. God, I wanted to read it. Everything I was searching for could be in its pages, right in my hands.

  It was my decision; she had said as much. Yet, at some point, she had changed her tune in a dramatic way. She had gone from warning me to leave the country, to now inviting me to stay. It was suspicious at best, but there was a new piece at play in the game, the text I held in my hands.

  I had planned to stay anyway even when there had been the possibility that I may not have been allowed to leave. The secrets that book held, were far too tempting to let slip from my grasp I needed to know what those pages had to hide.

  “So,” I started, lifting my gaze to meet hers, “do I have a room or something?” I watched as her all too familiar smirk appeared again.

  “Sis’ I thought you’d never ask.”

  11

  Finally, I’d stopped to get a notebook. All my research was starting to get overwhelming and typing it all out was great, but it didn’t have the same feel.

  I felt the need to make sure I wrote it all down by hand, in hopes that maybe it would help it all sink in more. Between my continued trips to the archives, to studying the book at home, I needed somewhere besides my laptop to physically keep track of my notes.

  I had also officially moved in with Iseult. I still had my reservations about it, but if it meant getting access to the McLoughlin book, I was willing to risk it.

  After everything that had happened outside the pub, Keilan hadn’t been thrilled when I’d starting packing. It made it more difficult knowing I couldn’t tell her the truth, not the whole truth at least. She would have been even less thrilled to see me go if she’d known the extent of it all, but I couldn’t tell her things I didn’t fully understand myself. I couldn’t dwell on what I didn’t know, instead I had to focus on learning as much as I could while I had the chance.

  We had discussed what had happened at the building her scent tracking had led me to, and I knew from her reaction, she hadn’t been part of any trap. She had insisted that at the time she’d discovered it my mother’s scent had been the only one present at the time. She had even expressed guilt for not going straight inside to find her.

  I didn’t blame her; this wasn’t her fight and I didn’t need her getting hurt over whatever family drama I had found myself in the middle of.

  We agreed to keep getting together, whenever I had free time. She also promised to keep trying to track down my mother’s scent.

  The McLoughlin Leabhear only had the spells that had been passed down from generation to generation. What I needed, were genealogical records. I needed to be able to trace our bloodline back to the exact moment we had branched off.

  It was unfortunate really. I had hoped that having my sister around would be a bigger asset in my quest. It looked as if Iseult knew as much as I did. Or, if she knew more, she wasn’t willing to share.

  The sickening fact was, that what I needed was
probably back at Broadhaven. The lineage, the secrets were in McLoughlin Manor, hidden among the things Patrick hadn’t wanted me to see.

  I’d been limited access to only one set of scrolls, the ones belonging to my other side of the family.

  I tried to recall all the scrolls that Brendan had shown me from the Cavanagh archives. There had been so many, and I thought, foolishly it seemed now, that I’d have more time to peruse them.

  The date 1198 was sitting in the forefront of my mind. Was that the year they had gone into hiding?

  “What are you doing?” Her voice had pulled my attention back to the moment. My mind had wandered so far that my gaze had fixed on nothing in particular, my stare blank as my thoughts consumed me.

  “Sorry?”

  I blinked and turned my head in the direction of the voice. My eyes focused on the figure before me until finally, Iseult came into clear view.

  “You were staring at the wall like it was holding a conversation.”

  I laughed; my tone apologetic though I supposed the talking walls weren’t beyond the realm of possibility

  “I just got lost in my thoughts.” The simplest explanation for a complicated situation.

  I could only confide in her so much.

  Even though she had saved me, there was still a barrier between us. I wasn’t sure that I could put my complete trust her, in fact, I still wasn’t sure I could trust her at all.

  “About?”

  In spite of my distrust, she had been good at not prying into my process, until now.

  I was still navigating what it meant to have a sister.

  It was new and strange. A small part of me had wanted to believe we would instantly have this impenetrable bond. In reality, we were still strangers.

  “Everything.”

  That was the truth.

  “About the book?” She gestured to the text in my hand.

  I offered her a careful shrug of my shoulders. The book was only part of the mystery that was terrorizing my mind. A very small part.

  “I wish there was a way to organize my mind. Every time that I think that I’ve finally come to terms with one thing, a new bombshell drops.”