by Nora Roberts
“The six of them that night?” The image of those company dishes carefully set ran clear through Tonia’s inner vision. “Can you see them?”
He could, ghosts around the table, with a sparkle of champagne in glasses, fat pheasants on a platter, bowls and dishes holding food as they toasted each other. A fire crackling, and the scents of the roasted birds, the home-cooked dishes, perfume, candle wax.
“The farmer at the head,” he continued. “His wife at the foot. The twin brothers, the wives who are like sisters. They’re friends here as well as family. Their children and children’s children aren’t here tonight, but scattered after the holiday visit. Not Katie, who had to stay home with the twins she’s brewing inside her. So it’s the six here, old friends, good family, toasting the end of the year, not knowing it would be the end of all.”
“They loved each other.” Tonia, tears in her eyes, tipped her head to Duncan’s shoulder. “You can see it, feel it.”
“It’s already in him. Ross MacLeod.” Duncan gestured to a seat. “He doesn’t know, but it’s in him, dark and deadly.”
“In all before the plates are cleared. I’m sorry.” Fallon kept a step away, letting the twins have their time. Because it made her unbearably sad, she whisked away the dust, the cobwebs.
Duncan met her eyes, a world of sorrow in his, then moved on.
The living room—or would they call it a parlor?—proved as tidy as the rest. Wood stacked neat in the hearth with kindling beneath as if waiting for the match to send it crackling.
Tonia walked to the mantel, took down a framed photo, wiped away the dust. “Duncan. This must have been taken the year before, or maybe the year before that. It’s all of them, with the Christmas tree. Mom. This must be … Duncan.”
He studied it with her. Hugh and Millie—the farmers. His grandparents, his great-uncle and great-aunt. Cousins they’d never known. His mother—so young! And beside her, his arm over her shoulders … “Our father.”
“We’ve never seen a picture of him,” Tonia said. “When Mom went into labor, she didn’t have time to take anything. New York was in chaos, and she was alone. She didn’t take anything when she drove to the hospital. Her Tony was already gone. He’s so handsome.”
“You should take it to her.” Again, Fallon kept a few steps back, gave them room. “Nothing would mean more than a picture of her family together.”
They went through the rest of the house, finding each room carefully left. Beds made, towels folded, clothes hung or tucked into drawers.
“We’ll come back,” Duncan decided. “After it’s done we’ll bring Mom back, and Hannah. They’ll want that.”
“So do I.” Tonia squeezed his hand. “I want to see it in the light. It’s a good place, Duncan. It needs to live again.”
When they stepped back outside, Fallon drew her sword. The hooded figure standing beside Laoch held up her hands. “I’m no harm to you. My granny sent me to fetch you.” Her voice, thick with the country burr of Scotland, shook a little as she eyed the sword. “I only waited, not wanting to intrude.”
When she drew back her hood, Fallon saw a young girl, around the same age as the one they’d found on the altar. A young faerie, she realized, with bright hair, eyes wide with apprehension, and no dark in her.
“Your granny?”
“Aye. She said you’d come, and for me to wait and ask you to visit. We’re just down the road a bit. Dorcas Frazier, she is, and I’m Nessa. She knew your family, and would dearly love to have a visit with you. Would you come, please? She’s a hundred and two, you see, and I wouldn’t have her coming out in the cold.”
“Of course we’ll come.” Fallon sheathed her sword.
“She’ll be so pleased. It’s not far, and it’s safe enough now.”
“Now?” Duncan repeated as they walked with her, the animals following.
“Aye, now.” She glanced back at the blanketed burden Laoch carried. “I think that must be Aileen. She was a friend, and I feared for her when she couldn’t be found.”
“Do you know who did this to her?” Duncan demanded.
“It’s best to talk to Granny, but those who did it are gone for now. You’re the twins. Katie and Tony’s. Granny knew them, and your grandparents, and the rest of the MacLeods.”
They walked the dark road, past a cottage or two. Fallon saw candlelight gleaming, smelled smoke from chimneys, and animals bedded down in stalls and pens.
“How many are you?”
“We’re near to a hundred, but it’s a quiet place. Some move on, and some move in, you could say. There’s good land to farm, and good hunting, fishing.”
“Any trouble with DUs?” Tonia asked.
“I don’t ken.”
“Magickals,” Fallon explained, “who bring harm.”
“The Dark Ones. Granny will tell you. She has such stories.” She looked shyly at Fallon. “She’s told me many of you. This is our cottage. The rest of our family is there, and just a bit farther up the road. But I stay with Granny and help her tend the cottage and the animals.”
She led the way to a pretty little house with magickal charms painted on the door, and others hanging from the eaves to click and clack and chime in the wind.
“You are very welcome here,” Nessa said, and opened the door.
Though the hearth—the heart of the room—was small, the fire roared in it. Candles lit the room with both charm and cheer.
The old woman sat near the fire, a plaid blanket over her lap, a red shawl around her shoulders despite the heat pumping. She had a thin, fluffy bowl of white hair around a face mapped with lines, and eyes as clear and blue as a summer lake.
Those eyes clouded with tears as she held out a hand. “You brought them, my good lassie. We’ll have whiskey, won’t we? And some cake. Please be welcome and sit. Oh, Katie’s babies. How excited your granny was for you to come into the world. A good woman was Angie MacLeod, I hope you know. You have your grandfather’s eyes, girl. Sit, sit.”
“I’m Tonia.” She took the hand offered, then a stool by the chair. “Antonia.”
“For your father. I met Tony more than once. Oh, a handsome one, and a good heart inside him with a sense of fun along with it. So in love was he with your mother, and how he made her smile. Did they live, child? I haven’t been able to see.”
“He died before we were born.”
“I’m sorry for it. Rest his soul. Your mother?”
“She’s well.”
“And that’s a blessing. And you, boy, with your father’s fine looks and your mother’s eyes.”
“Duncan. It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Frazier.”
“Duncan, for the MacLeod end of things. You’ll give your mother my best, won’t you? The best from old Dorcas Frazier, who lived just down the road and used to give her ginger biscuits.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your family were friends to me. I knew the Duncan you’re named for. Flirted with him when we were younger than young. Sit here now, there’s a lad.”
She drew a breath and, clear again, her eyes met Fallon’s. “I wondered so many times why I would live and live, wake every morning to a new day. So many new days. Some reasons, I thought, were for my Nessa. How could I leave my sweet lassie? Now I know I lived and lived and lived some more so to welcome the MacLeods back home. And to welcome The One into mine. Bright blessings on you, Fallon Swift.”
“And on you, Dorcas Frazier.”
She took Mrs. Frazier’s hand and marveled at how bold and bright the light burned in a body so stiff and bent with age. She took the chair offered as Nessa passed out whiskey and cake.
“The whiskey’s good,” Mrs. Frazier told them. “We still know how to make it around here. And the cake my own Nessa baked just this morning.”
“You said we’d have guests tonight, and to put a little extra love into it.”
Her grandmother cackled. “So I did. My Nessa is full of love. To the love, we’ll drink then, and to the light.”
They lifted glasses, and Fallon learned the whiskey was indeed good.
“You’ll have questions. You sit now, Nessa, for you should hear the questions and what answers I can give.”
“How is it the house hasn’t been touched? There are things inside,” Duncan continued, “that would be of use to you and others.”
“The house is of the MacLeods. Those of us who come from here respect that, and those who’ve come since are told. I think the house itself holds others out. It let you in, you ken. You’re blood, after all. Hugh died within two days after your family left for home and for London on business. Millie, ah, a strong woman was she, lived two more. I nursed her, as when the sickness came, I only became stronger. So I nursed her, and then Jamie, your cousin.”
“You cleaned the house,” Tonia said. “Cleaned it, made their beds.”
“As a friend would do for a friend. My son and my granddaughter, who lived, helped with it. We took the food, but nothing else.”
“Thank you.” Duncan took her hand again and, following his heart, kissed her thin fingers. “For tending to our family, and our home.”
“We buried them, and so many others, in the churchyard. There was hope in some that it would pass and things would be as they were. Fear as well, and no word from outside for some time. Some fled, never to be seen again. Others came and stayed. Those like we here, and those who accepted that magick was back in the world.
“I know the day you were born,” she said to Fallon. “I saw it that night, that last night with the party lights and the celebrating. I took Ross MacLeod’s hand, and saw. A good man, and none of his doing, not of his knowing. But it would start with him. And on the night he died, in that moment the dark struck, your light burst free, sparked by the blood of the Tuatha de Danann, the blood the MacLeods would pass down to theirs. You would be born in the storm, and delivered not into the hands of the one who sired you, but into the hands of one meant to rear you.”
She sipped more whiskey. “You’ve known loss, all of you, and still so young. You’ll know more. Loss can shake faith if you let it, and the dark gloats when faith seeps out with loss.”
“The dark comes here, too.”
The old woman nodded at Fallon. “It does. They come to the sgiath de solas.”
“Shield of light.”
“Aye, the circle, the shield, the evil they unleashed. And every year, near to the time it opened, they come and make a sacrifice to the dark.”
“Granny, they found Aileen.”
“Ah.” A long, long sigh as she reached for Nessa’s hand to comfort. “I feared it. Since the first year after Year One, they come. They lure a young one, usually a girl, but not always, into the woods. The woods were once green and full of game, a good place. Now cursed by what lives there.”
“What lives there?” Tonia asked.
“It has no name I know. No face, no form but what it steals. It’s a dead place now, that wood, and no one dare enter. I don’t know what they do to the poor girls there. I can’t see, or it may be I won’t see.”
“They tried for me only last year,” Nessa said. “But Granny has charms on my window, on the door. And I wear this.” She gripped the charm around her neck. “Still I felt the pulling, I heard the music, so bright and fun. I went to Granny and stayed all night in her bed. It was Maggie went missing that night, and never found again. She was but twelve.”
“Who are they?” Fallon asked. “Has anyone seen them?”
“The first year there were two, a man and a woman. Both handsome, but a false front, that beauty. Scarred they were under it, and beneath the false front and scars, souls dead and black as pitch.”
Shivering, she drew the shawl closer around her shoulders. “I saw them fly over the MacLeod farm, him on black wings, her on white, and she threw flames at the house, but they bounced away like balls as they flew on. To the circle, to the wood. It was that night the first of the children went missing.”
“Eric and Allegra,” Fallon stated.
“You know them?”
“They killed my sire. They’ve come every year in January?”
“Each year. But the next after that first they had a baby, and they became three who fed the dark. The child grew—pretty as a plum—but with hair dark on one side, pale on the other. As were her wings.”
“Petra.” Duncan’s hand balled into a fist.
“There’s more in her than in them.” Because they trembled a little, Mrs. Frazier used both hands to lift the whiskey to her lips.
Nessa added wood to the fire, whiskey to the glasses.
“More dark in her,” Mrs. Frazier continued, “and a madness you can feel wild on the air as she passes over. Only days ago, they came, but like these last few years, only the mother and daughter.”
“I killed Eric. Or I wounded him,” Fallon corrected. “My father—my life father—finished him.”
“As is just.”
“Only those?” Tonia asked. “No other DUs—Dark Ones?”
“We hear tales of Dark Ones, others, but none have come here but those three. Now two. I see them, though in the week they’re known to come, I close the cottage tight. But I see them.” She tapped her temple. “And on the night they feed the dark, storms rage.”
“Granny says…” Nessa hesitated, then continued at her great-grandmother’s nod. “She says they leave us be so we’ll stay, and we’ll keep having children they can take to the wood. We’re taught not to listen to the music, to wear the charms, but some don’t really believe, or the lure is too strong. Can you stop them?”
“We’ll stop them. Have you seen the black dragon?”
As the glass tipped in her granny’s hand, Nessa reached out to steady it. “Is it real then? I thought it a fancy. I’ve seen it soar over the wood, and into it, but no one else has. And in a dream I saw it sleeping inside the stone dance, but there’s been no sign of such a creature.”
“It guards the source.” Fallon’s eyes deepened as the vision rose. “It spies, in dragon shape and man shape, and plants dissension like weeds to grow and choke off the light. It serves its master as does its rider, as does the pale witch. It mates with the mad one, and in her seeks to plant the seed that will become the child. In the child, the source reborn so the dark rules all.”
Fallon got to her feet. “We will strike them down, with sword, with arrow, with blinding light, with the blood of the gods, because we must. Look for the light, Granaidh,” she told the old woman. “When you see it burst like the sun, when the tree of life blooms on MacLeod land, you’ll know it’s done.”
“I will look. I will pray, and we will send our light to you.”
She took the woman’s hand. “Thank you for your hospitality. Can you tell us where to find Aileen’s family?”
“Nessa will take you.” She kissed Fallon’s hand. “Safe journeys to you, to the children of the MacLeods. May all the gods go with you.”
* * *
Lana had done as Tonia asked, so when they returned, they found Katie and Hannah with Lana and Simon, with wine and a fire. And waves of relief when they came in.
“The dragon slayers,” Hannah said with a smile.
“Not tonight. There’s a lot to tell anyway, but first…” Tonia went to her mother, offered the photograph.
“Oh, oh God. Oh, this is from the Christmas before. The last time I was there.” She pressed it to her heart, rocked. “I never thought I’d see them again.”
She tipped it down. “Your father. It’s Tony. Do you see?”
“Let’s get some more wine.” Lana rose, signaled to Simon, to Fallon. “We’ll give them some time. Where did you find a picture?”
“We went to the house. The MacLeod farm. I wouldn’t mind the wine. It’s been a night. Like Tonia said, there’s a lot to tell. We should do that all together, after they have that time.”
“And maybe a little something to eat.”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
Simon got the w
ine, rubbed a hand on Fallon’s shoulder. “There’s blood on you again.”
She only sighed. “Demon wolves. We’ll get to them, and all the rest.” But to make things easier, she swiped her hands down, vanished the bloodstains.
Duncan came in. “Appreciate the tact. And you were right, Fallon, there’s nothing we could have brought back to Mom that meant more than that picture. If you could all come back, we could get through this. She and Hannah have a lot of questions.”
Lana picked up a tray of snacks. “So do we. Duncan, Fallon, grab more glasses and small plates, would you?”
When they were alone, Duncan ran a hand down Fallon’s back as she opened a cupboard. It surprised him how much he needed contact, but he didn’t question it.
“It’s going to take some time to walk them through it all,” he began. “And after, I’m going to need to stay with Mom. She’s handling it, but it’s stirred things up.”
“I can’t even imagine it. You think you can because you’ve heard all the stories, but you just can’t. She lost everything, everyone, so fast, so hard.”
“I thought I understood, but I didn’t. Not until I went into that house and felt it, felt them. So Tonia, Hannah, and I need to stay close tonight.”
“It’s going to be the same here, once my mother knows about Allegra and Petra.” She handed him a stack of small plates. “More stirring things up. I promised my three a hunt tomorrow. Maybe you’d like in on that.”
“I’m doing a couple classes at the academy in the afternoon, but I’ve got the morning.”
“First light, east woods?”
“That works. Buy you breakfast at the community kitchen after.”
“That really works.”
As they carried in the dishes, Duncan realized he’d—inadvertently—obeyed Simon’s strong suggestion during their conversation. He was taking Fallon on a date.
* * *
For two brisk, bright hours past dawn, Fallon rode the woods with Duncan. The night’s snowfall left a fresh, fluffy six inches over the forest floor. The air smelled of it, of pine and purity, as they followed the tracks of a wild boar.